Word: lehmbruck
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...exhibition gives plenty of scope to the artists of the Brucke and Blaue Reiter groups (there is a particularly fine sequence of early Kandinskys); but it is strong on artists who belonged to neither, such as Wilhelm Lehmbruck, whose war-induced suicide in 1919 at the age of 38 truncated what might have been one of the great sculptural oeuvres of the 20th century. The best coup is to have reunited the two completed parts of Grosz's blistering anti-establishment triptych of 1926, Eclipse of the Sun and Pillars of Society. The latter, with its beer-hall vision...
...Paris to Berlin. As the German art historian Werner Spies remarks in the catalogue to "Paris-Berlin," the visits made by Henri Matisse or Robert Delaunay to Germany were "marked by a condescending paternalism," in contrast to the tentative and supplicatory visits that German artists like August Macke, Wilhelm Lehmbruck or Max Beckmann made to France: the French went to Germany as living demonstrations, the Germans by and large to Paris as students...
What direction would Lehmbruck's art have taken if he had lived? Perhaps toward the kind of immobile, space-arresting thinness that Giacometti achieved. But that seems unlikely, for there is an intrinsic sentimentality to Lehmbruck's work that almost precludes the possibility of such absolute concentration...
...effect of the National Gallery's show is that the merits of Lehmbruck's last years were in form and the failures were in expression. Isolate the head of Praying Girl, 1918, and it is unremarkable. What makes the sculpture live is the brilliantly worked-out series of triangular voids defined by the armpits, the forearms and the slender torso; the body becomes a drawing in space...
...image of self-debate from the vulgarities of Nazi youthcult art; the exaggerated slenderness verges on caricature but nowhere falls into it, and to look at the structural grace of the body, with its bent leg thrusting into the pelvis like a flying buttress, is to realize how well Lehmbruck could surround a figure with active space instead of merely displacing air with bronze. Perhaps if Lehmbruck had lived to reconcile the contradictions in his art, he would have been - against his expectations - a better abstract sculptor than he was a figurative...