Barlach, Ernst

Barlach, Ernst (1870–1938). German sculptor, printmaker, and writer, a leading figure of Expressionism. He was born at Wedel, near Hamburg, the son of a doctor, and studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Hamburg, 1888–91, the Dresden Academy, 1891–5, and the Académie Julian, Paris, 1895–6. After his return to Germany he spent the next decade working variously in and around Hamburg and in Berlin. During this period he worked as much on ceramics as on sculpture in a fairly derivative Art Nouveau style, but a turning-point in his career came in 1906 when he went to Russia to visit a brother who was working for an industrial company in the Ukraine. The vast empty landscape and the sturdy Russian peasants made a great impact on Barlach, as his sketchbooks show. These hardworking people, with their simple faith, symbolized for him ‘the human condition in its nakedness between Heaven and Earth’ and helped inspire him to create a massively powerful figure style through which he expressed a wide range of emotion. He was influenced also by medieval German carving, with which he recognized both a spiritual and a technical affinity—he preferred to carve in heavy, close-grained woods, but even when his figures were modelled in clay and cast in bronze they retain the broad planes and sharp edges typical of woodcarving.

In 1907 Barlach became financially secure when he signed a contract with the Berlin dealer Paul Cassirer, agreeing to sell him his entire output for a fixed salary. In 1910 he moved to Güstrow, a small town near Rostock, where he was to spend the rest of his life, and by this time he had created his mature style, which changed little thereafter. His most characteristic works are massive, blocklike, heavily robed single figures or pairs of figures symbolizing some aspect of the human condition (The Solitary One, Kunsthalle, Hamburg, 1911). George Heard Hamilton writes that ‘Whether in wood or plaster the forms are sometimes so tightly compact that their emotional charge seems about to explode'. Barlach also produced several monuments commemorating the First World War and he was a prolific maker of lithographs and woodcuts, particularly of illustrations to his own plays. The first of these to appear was Der tote Tag (The dead day), published by Cassirer's Pan-Presse in Berlin in 1912; the text was accompanied by a separate portfolio of 27 lithographs. He published six more plays, the last in 1929; they are sombre works, typically showing the individual wrestling with the ties of the material world in search of God, but they sometimes have a grotesque humour not seen in his sculpture.

After the First World War (in which he served briefly in the army) Barlach was much honoured. He was made a member of the Berlin Academy in 1919, for example, and of the Munich Academy in 1925, and in 1924 was awarded the Kleist Prize (for literature). His autobiography, Ein selbsterzähltes Leben, was published in 1928 and his 60th birthday in 1930 was marked by a large exhibition of his work at the Berlin Academy. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, however, he was declared a degenerate artist; 381 of his works were confiscated from museums and his war memorials at Güstrow, Kiel, and Magdeburg were dismantled. In 1937 he wrote: ‘A pimp or a murderer is better off. He at least gets a legal hearing and can defend himself. But we are simply repudiated, and whenever possible purged.’ He died the following year. After the war, his memorial in Güstrow Cathedral was restored and a copy made for the Antoniterkirche in Cologne; it takes the form of a hovering bronze angel and is considered by many to be his most deeply spiritual work. There are museums dedicated to Barlach in Güstrow, Hamburg, and Ratzeburg. His collected writings have been published in three volumes (1956–9) and his letters in two volumes (1968–9).