Word: barlach
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...familiar plight of painters and writers in seeking recognition is traditionally surpassed only by poets and sculptors, those artists who perpetually face the problem of addressing an extremely limited audience. And so, Aristide Maillol, Ernst Barlach and Gerhard Marcks, all noted for their sculpture, have translated their sculptural conception of form and line into two dimensions via the highly communicable medium of graphic...
...Barlach, for instance, represented both by woodcuts and lithos, proves far more convincing in the former category. The woodcut, rarely a delicate medium, is one challenging to subtlety; Barlach capitalizes upon its bold, vigorous hardness, converting a linear element to sculptural, determined shape, substituting candid and forceful areas for greater refinement of expression. In dealing directly with problems of drawing, via lithography, Barlach's result becomes highly tenuous, unsure, and often completely confused. The same attempt at vitality employed to convey vignettes brutal in subject falters and emerges much weaker in its substitution of the crayon for the chisel...
...etchings "The War," (Der Krieg), transcends his subject's initial impact and there-by penetrates it. War's waste, fatigue and death become something mystical, even poetic. The starkness of his black-and-white tones produce an awareness far more effective than Kathe Kollwitz's unbounded sentimentality or Ernst Barlach's heavy-handed portrayal of heavy-handed destruction. And the transcendence involved is not emotional but aesthetic...
...that the schism between poetry and Strum and Drang lies in intensity of emotion or dramatic nature of the subject. Actually Goya's "Disasters of War," certainly more graphic than anything here, or Picasso's "Guernica," more symbolic and abstract than anything here, answer an emphatic no. For if Barlach, Kollwitz, Grosz, et al, utter an emotional cry from the blackness of chaos and confusion, it is Picasso and Goya who offer, with emotion disciplined. "right" and "inevitable," an answer which cannot help being true...
...realism and criticized much of her early work as too "anecdotal." Yet her development was towards an extremely expressive monumental style that was bold, simple, and marked by heavy lines and broad rhythms. With great humility and a life's devotion to her art she joined her spiritual master Barlach as one of the masters of German Expressionism...