Wilhelm Lehmbruck
German, 1881-1919

Torso of the Pensive Woman, 1918
painted plaster
41 1/2 x 17 1/2 x 10 in.

SBMA, Bequest of Wright S. Ludington
1993.1.34



Wilhelm Lehmbruck - undated photograph

“Sculpture is the essence of things, the essence of nature, that which is eternally human.” - Wilhelm Lehmbruck

RESEARCH PAPER

Wilhelm Lehmbruck was a late 19th/early 20th c. German poet, printmaker, painter, and sculptor best known for his elongated nudes. Lehmbruck and his countryman, Ernst Barlach, can be arguably described as the most important German sculptors of the Classical Modern Age. Lehmbruck became a pioneer of 20th century sculpture.

Born a miner’s son in Meiderich (now Duisburg), Germany on January 4th, 1881 - in the same year as Léger and Picasso - Lehmbruck was the fourth of eight children. All of his ancestors were farmers, yet he was drawn to artful activity at an early age. He carved directly in chalk and plaster using a penknife and without earlier having made a model. He fashioned 3-dimensional figures such as that of historical or mythological characters from sketches in his school books. As a young teenager he was admitted to the Art School of Duisburg after winning many prizes and scholarships.

When Lehmbruck was 18 his father died. His family could not support him in school so he supplemented his scholarships by drawing portraits, and creating designs for industrial products and illustrations for scientific books, and helping out in a sculptor’s studio. At 20, he entered the Kunstakademie at Düsseldorf and studied there for six years as the master pupil of Karl Janssen, a German sculptor working in the Baroque revival tradition. There he earned more scholarships and stipends and the use of a studio and models. Lehmbruck worked in accordance with the technical skills and the knowledge of anatomy that he learned in the Academy; he had not yet developed a personal style. His sculptural piece, "Bathing Woman," was purchased by the Academy in 1905 for their collection. This allowed him to travel to Italy for several months. Early influences on Lehmbruck were Belgian sculptor, Constantin Emil Meunier as well as the studies of Michelangelo. He was also greatly impressed by the work of Rodin. In art school he started to sculpt in wood and then marble. Soon he discovered that his favorite mediums were cast stone (similar to cement) and, above all, bronze.

Lehmbruck successfully submitted work shown in the Grand Palais in Paris and he became a member of the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts. In 1908 he married Anita Kaufmann who was his most frequently used model and in 1909, when he was age 29, they had their first son of three. A year later he and his family moved to Paris, a city where Lehmbruck experienced a freedom of expression that he had not been able to explore at the Academy in Düsseldorf. He made the acquaintance of avant-garde Modernists including Henri Matisse, Alexander Archipenko, Constantin Brancusi and Amadeo Modigliani who had returned from Italy and was sculpting at the time. These artists inspired Lehmbruck towards pursuing Expressionist sculpture. He was a highly regarded artist in the Parisian art community, and it was here in Paris that he discovered his own sculptural style. Influenced by Rodin’s rough physicality and emotional intensity and Aristide Maillol’s large figurative work, Lehmbruck focused on making introverted, spiritual figures. Flemish sculptor, George Minne, spoke to Lehmbruck’s sense of man’s inner spiritual conflicts and supported his approach to spiritualized sculpture. By lengthening the human figure, which emphasized its significance as the bearer of emotions, and moral and spiritual attitudes, he distinguished himself as an Expressionist. Then by deconstructing the form, he increased the expression of his ideal human figures. He broke through the closed (tectonic) form of sculpture to one that was expressive, discontinuous, and reduced.

Expressionist sculpture does not attempt to imitate forms in nature, but instead to create abstract images. This is evident in Lehmbruck’s work. He pursued the creation of space with the human body that not only showed a physical separation but simultaneously a confluence of emotion connecting the form and the viewer. This was to a point that even exceeded Rodin. Earlier sculpture had reached its peak of expressing something inward and beyond visual terms. Sculpture now required to speak to the senses of hearing, pondering, and intuition and evolved into a new language. Details such as the furrowed brow of Rodin’s "Thinker" had been used to express intensity of thought; the vocabulary now shifted from gestures of strong emotional and psychologically dramatic content and were reduced to an intense minimum. These expressionistic reductions appeared in Lehmbruck’s work as smooth surfaces and also pocked, tortured active ones, especially evident in the last years of his life.

In July of 1914 under the threat of war, Lehmbruck fled Paris to Germany registering with the military reserve for ambulance service. But in 1915 was notified that his service would be that of a battle scene painter. At this time he moved his family to Switzerland to escape military duty and continued his work as an artist, exhibiting in Germany and Switzerland. He suffered bouts of depression over the tremendous loss of life he witnessed with The Great War.

The friendship of young Viennese actress, Elisabeth Bergner, in 1917 offered Lehmbruck another model for his work. Unfortunately, his attraction to her extended beyond that relationship and, worse, the actress did not return his affection. This unrequited situation nearly broke up his marriage and Lehmbruck was despondent. When he was selected as a member of the Prussian Academy of Fine Arts, he wrote to his wife of his returned will to live with promises to create a better future. Six days later he committed suicide at the age of 38. The exact reason for his decision to take his life is uncertain. He was wracked with guilt for his unfaithfulness to his wife, and pained by the rejection of his affection to Bergner, but he was also horrified by the war and felt guilty to live and have success when so many his age had been killed.

In the "Torso of the Pensive Woman" we see an elegant, assertive, and vulnerable woman. Lehmbruck created sculpted figures from stillness and serenity. Although Lehmbruck was not involved in the German Expressionist movement, the emotionalism and elongated features of his sculptures led critics and historians to associate him with Expressionism. It was his practice to base new sculptures on parts of larger works. He made many “pensive women” sculptures with head, arms, and legs and then removed them to explore a contemplative spirit not fully demonstrated through typical facial expression and position of limbs.

This figure of cast stone (a composition of cement, stone dust, and pigment) gives the look of weathered natural stone as the fissure-like lines across her torso imply. Lehmbruck based most of his female figures on his wife, Anita, but with an effort to embrace the mental rather than the physical state of a form. Her elegant neck glides into straightened shoulders, a very erect back moves down to an exaggeratedly small waist and her hips flare to appear as a woman who has been pregnant. The buttocks are elongated in the Gothic style. From the side, the arm is set back slightly enough to imagine the elbow bent and the hand resting on the back of the hip. Every angle is self-contained and highly expressive. Her right leg is slightly forward and the left hip is slightly higher than the right exhibiting a contrapposto pose. Here the weight is on the left foot suggesting a calm and relaxed state of mind. The breasts may not seem as those of a mother of three, but Lehmbruck was a virtuoso of shyness. The high, small breasts shyly tilt their heads away from us as he blends sensuous fullness with shy purity. He was a master of quiet moments with the spirit of reflectiveness that he created in his sculptures. Lehmbruck took his life just one year after completing this amazing sculpture.

(In 1937 the Nazis defamed Lehmbruck as a "degenerate artist" and seized 116 of his works from German museums).

Prepared for the SBMA Docent Council By Pma Tregenza, April 9, 2013

Bibliography

Barron, S. (1984) German Expressionist Sculpture, LACMA

Collection Information (n.d.) Lehmbruck Museum- Centre for International Sculpture, Duisburg, Germany www.lehmbruckmuseum.de

Heller, R. (1972) The Art of Wilhelm Lehmbruck, National Gallery of Art, Washington

Hoff,A., Westheim, P. (1936) Wilhelm Lehmbruck Life and Work, Frederick A. Praeger Publishers New York, Washington

Hofmann, W. (1959) Lehmbruck, Netherlands, Allert de Lange

Schwartz, S. (2012) Wilhelm Lehmbruck: A Grand & Tender Artist, New York Review of Books