Word: lehmbruck
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...question was not wholly rhetorical. On March 25, 1919, depressed by a crisis in his own work and by the trauma of the lost war, Lehmbruck killed himself. He was 38. Ever since, the German art world has tended to the view that Lehmbruck's was an exemplary suicide-that, as Critic Reinhold Heller puts it, "his death became a supplication for peace and a sacrificial self-immolation in a world which had declared...
Fortunately, Lehmbruck's truncated output survived the Third Reich -though Hitler considered it, along with most expressionist art, degenerate -and in 1964 a special Lehmbruck museum opened in his native city, Duisburg. But though revered in Germany, Lehmbruck is not well known in America. To rectify this, the National Gallery in Washington has organized a Lehmbruck retrospective, which will run until Aug. 13, thus giving Americans a chance to assess the wistful and curiously poignant work of this haunted...
...mark of Lehmbruck's sculpture is its inwardness. Lank, elongated and contemplative, his figures seem involved in a degree of soul searching that inevitably recalls the earlier romantic artists of 19th century Germany. Lehmbruck was an excellent generalizer but an undistinguished portraitist. He seldom made an individual's face. The earliest known Lehmbruck, a bust of himself done in 1898 at the age of 17, is an exception to this. But it is, as one might expect, a rudimentary effort, stiff and mute. Fifteen years later, when he made his Head of an Old Woman, the image succeeded...
...believe," Lehmbruck proclaimed, "that we are again approaching a truly great art and that soon we shall give expression to our time through a monumental contemporary style." He was right-the irony being that this promise was not fulfilled by his own sculpture. There is scarcely one of his works that does not suffer in some measure from the tension between Lehmbruck's large desires and his extreme sensitivity, which resulted in a frequent indecision about surface modeling as well as a troublesome theatricality of facial expression and gesture. It is as though the psychological burden of being...
...Lehmbruck was a finely responsive modeler, but he rarely contrived to give his nudes the unabashed, vigorous monumentality of Maillol's. Qualified by unease, bowed down by shame, indecision or guilt, they avert their gaze and seem on the point of flight or evaporation. The result was a fervently decorative and mannered style of representing the nude, which owed a great deal to Modigliani. A sculpture like Seated Girl, 1913-14, with its long geometrical curve running from toe through thigh and torso to the impossible declination of the neck, is a fascinating prediction of Art Deco: coarser variants...