Friday, January 15, 2016

EXPESSIONIST SCULPTURE (EXPANDED)

One of the best war memorials I've ever seen is a German Expressionist sculpture (above) by Ernst Barlach. It was executed in clay in 1927 to commemorate the dead of WWI, but the Nazis didn't like it and WWII intervened with the result that it wasn't cast in bronze until 1952. It's a pity that it's not better known. The horror of war may never have been depicted as accurately.

Thinking about Barlach made me curious to know more about the Expressionist sculptors.



So far as I know the first Expressionist sculptor was Rodin, a Frenchman. For Rodin nature was a starting point but it always had to be modified by human bias. You could argue that sculpture was always like that but Rodin added exploration and risk and performance. Even humor.
Rodin worked in clay, marble and bronze but lots of later German sculptors preferred wood. Maybe that's because their African influences worked in that medium. Maybe it's because wood was cheap and the artists were poor. One sculptor (Kirchner, above) said he liked wood because the process of carving and creation were visible on the finished piece for all to see. Conventional sculpture was worked in clay and handed off to others
for casting. Only in wood could you say that the final product was produced by a single mind.


Incidentally, I like the way Kirchner frequently photographed his sculptures (above) against painted patterns. 


For all its beauty there's something wild and almost unhinged about early German Expressionism, as if the artists who did it were crazy or under a lot of stress. It was an odd discipline because in its early stage it seemed incapable of expressing happiness or sentimentality.

I don't know of any other medium that deliberately excluded a whole range of human emotion. Even so, there are ideas and insights it would be difficult to express if that kind of art didn't exist.



In order to illustrate this point I had to use a painting rather than sculpture. That's because sculpture rarely succeeded in isolating the negative emotions as well as painting. The same might be said of early Expressionist architecture. The first examples were somber and horrific (above).


Later the medium evolved into something that could convey humor and fun.


4 comments:

Invisibules said...

Have you seen the 1920 expressionist film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari? I think you would love it.

Eddie Fitzgerald said...

Invisibules: I've seen it. In fact, I saw a recently recently released re-master and it was to die for.

From Eddie: sorry for the delay in putting up a new post. Blogger isn't accepting new posts, at least not right now, and not from me. I don't know what the problem is, but I'm looking into it. I'll post as soon as I can.

Dan Riba said...

When I was at DIC, Richard Raynis had us use the Barlach statue as the model for our villian's spaceship. It's eyes and mouth were open and big destructive energy beams came out of them. It was very different approach to a spaceship...a very arresting visual. In hindsight I wonder how respectful of a WW I war memorial we were...turning it into a space battleship.

Eddie Fitzgerald said...

Dan: Wow! It makes sense that a villain would have a ship that looks like him...in fact, if I ever become a villain I might do that myself!