Word: barlach
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...long list of artists to suffer the fatal derision of Nazi Germany was one of Germany's greatest sculptors, Ernst Barlach. He died in 1938, shunned by his townspeople, condemned (falsely) as a Jew and Bolshevik. His work, based on the centuries-old tradition of wood carving and German Gothic art, was banned as "degenerate" and typical of "the passive Slav soul...
Since World War II, the very quality the Nazis detested most in Barlach's work -its expression of human striving and religious aspiration-has restored his work to the forefront of German 20th century art. In Germany today his war memorials in Magdeburg, Kiel and Hamburg, torn down by the Nazis, have been restored. Last week Barlach was being honored at Harvard's Busch-Reisinger Museum with his first comprehensive showing in the U.S., a traveling exhibition of 176 of his sculptures, drawings and prints...
...Donnerwetter!" The son of a physician in the small market town of Wedel, Holstein, young Barlach early learned to respect the mute suffering of the peasant as well as his unexpected guffaws of humor -both of which he later incorporated into his work. But it was not until his mid 30s that he found himself as an artist, after years of academic art courses at Hamburg and Dresden, followed by an unproductive trip to Paris...
...events finally gave direction to Barlach's groping. In Florence he sat at the feet of Poet Theodor Daubler, whose rhapsodic verse, mystically urging man to free his spirit from the pull of Earth, appealed to Barlach's own yearnings. Even more important was a two-month trip to southern Russia, where Barlach, on first sighting the sturdy peasant figures against the limitless perspective, exclaimed: "Donnerwetter! There sit bronzes...