WILHELM LEHMBRUCK, ARISTIDE MAILLOL
SCULPTURE
Jere Abbott
Jere Abbott: WILHELM LEHMBRUCK, ARISTIDE MAILLOL SCULPTURE. New York: Museum of Modern Art, March 1930. First Edition [1,000 copies]. Slim quarto. Printed thick brown stapled wrappers. 24 pp. 12 black and white plates. 27 works listed. Wrappers lightly worn. Text and illustrations fresh and clean. A very good or better copy. Rare.
7.5 x 10 softcover catalog with 24 pages followed by 12 black and white plates. Published on the occasion of the Museum of Modern Art MoMA Exhibit 4 from March 13 - April 2, 1930.
Wilhelm Lehmbruck (German, 1881 – 1919) was a German sculptor, painter and printmaker. He studied in Düsseldorf at the Kunstgewerbeschule from 1895 to 1901 and under Karl Janssen at the Kunstakademie from 1901 to 1906. His work was representative of established academic art. As well as making drawings of nudes and anatomical studies, he modelled works of typical contemporary subjects such as Siegfried and Shotputter (both clay, 1902; destr.); Woman Bathing (bronze, 1902; Duisburg, Lehmbruck-Mus.), however, displayed a new freedom and simplicity and one cast of it was bought by the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf in 1904. Lehmbruck was inspired by works that he saw at the Deutsch-nationale Kunstausstellung (1902) and by the Internationale Kunstausstellung (1904), both held in Düsseldorf, particularly those by Jules Dalou, Constantin Meunier and Auguste Rodin. In September 1904 he travelled to the Netherlands and to Bournemouth and the south coast of England. After travelling in Italy (1905) he was heavily influenced by Michelangelo’s work, and in particular the tombs of the Medici chapels in Florence.
On leaving the academy Lehmbruck worked as an independent artist in Düsseldorf. He exhibited for the first time at the Deutsche Kunstausstellung, in Cologne in 1906. During a trip to Paris in 1907 he saw the sculpture of Aristide Maillol. While there he joined the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, and in Germany the Vereinigung Düsseldorfer Künstler. At this time his work was still conventional, for example the plaster model for a Monument to Work (c. 1906; Duisburg, Lehmbruck-Mus.). At the Ausstellung für Christliche Kunst in Düsseldorf (1909) he and Wilhelm Kreis exhibited work as part of a design for a cemetery. In the model for the Heine memorial (c. 1906), the drawings for reliefs of 1908–10 and the small bronze Standing Female Nude (375×95×75 mm, 1908; Duisburg, Lehmbruck-Mus.), however, an individual style of solid plasticity began to emerge, revealing a move away from the influences of Rodin and Meunier, and a new affinity with the sensual, rounded figures of Maillol.
Lehmbruck decided to live in Paris after visiting and exhibiting there, especially because he recognized that he had made great strides in his recent work. In 1910 he moved into the Rue de Vaugirard, Montparnasse, where he met Bernhard Hoetger; he also made contact with André Derain, Constantin Brancusi and Alexander Archipenko. In Standing Female Figure (bronze, 1965×540×400 mm, 1910; artist’s estate, see 1979 exh. cat., no. 5) he combined the statuesque qualities of Hans von Marées’s work and the plasticity of Maillol’s; he also produced his first etchings and oil sketches at this time. Lehmbruck exhibited Standing Female Figure at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1910 with Man (plaster, 1909; Duisburg, Lehmbruck-Mus.), a sculpture in which the influence of Rodin was still marked. A radical change of style took place in 1911, however, embodied in the expressionistic Woman Kneeling (torso, stone cast, 1911; Berlin, Alte N.G.) in which clarity of form was balanced with an expressive, almost Gothic spirit. While the tectonics learnt from Marées and the mythical elements remained, the sensual curves of Maillol began to disappear; Theodor Däubler called the new work ‘the preface to Expressionism in sculpture’ (1916 exh. cat., intro.). Lehmbruck developed this tendency further in Ascending Youth (cast stone, 1913), a figure inspired by Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra.
In Paris Lehmbruck also came into contact with the avant-garde sculpture of Matisse, Modigliani, Derain and Archipenko. By this stage his own work was closer to that of Brancusi, although without the latter’s subjective simplication of form and later geometric abstraction. In 1912 he exhibited in the Folkwang-Museum in Hagen, with Egon Schiele; Lehmbruck’s existential figures shared great similarities with those of Schiele, while in their elongation, their tectonization and their clarity of form they were precursors of Max Beckmann’s sculptural style of 1916–18. In contrast to the formal explorations by the avant-garde of Paris, the works of Schiele, Lehmbruck and Beckmann are characterized by their psychological depth and their Expressionism. In 1914 Lehmbruck had his first major one-man exhibition in the Galerie Levesque, Paris. With Ernst Barlach and Beckmann he became a director of the Berlin Free Secession.
Lehmbruck was forced to leave Paris at the outbreak of World War I, moving to Berlin, where he sought to avoid conscription as a soldier, and where he was assigned to the Hospital Corps. During the war years Lehmbruck received financial support from the manufacturer Sally Falk in Mannheim. Lehmbruck’s work was included in the first German Kollektivausstellung, held in the Kunsthalle, Mannheim, in 1916. In the same year he exhibited a major example of Expressionist sculpture at the Berlin Secession, Fallen Man (1916; Berlin, Neue N.G.), portraying in the gesture of the fallen soldier reaching for the hilt of a sword the tragedy of the victims of war.
At the end of 1916 Lehmbruck emigrated to Switzerland. In Zurich he made contact with the Socialist L. Rubiner who collaborated on Franz Pfemfert’s Aktion. He made portraits of friends such as Theodor Däubler (bust; destr.) and Rubiner. His second major work of the war years was Seated Youth (artificial stone cast, 1917; Frankfurt am Main, Städel. Kstinst.), also called The Friend, representing a naked youth mourning the victims of war. He planned further major works, including a Pietà for a war memorial and a kneeling youth, but he made only fragmentary sculptures, torsos such as Daphne (1918) and the metaphorical self-portrait Head of a Thinker (1918; Duisburg, Lehmbruck-Mus.). Lehmbruck met a young actress, Elisabeth Bergner, and made models and drawings of her head. Among Lehmbruck’s etchings (dating from 1910) are the later studies of the Crucifixion and of a kneeling youth (Despair), the prints and sketches for Macbeth and for a planned Pietà. In 1919 he was elected into the Prussian Kunstakademie, but shortly afterwards he committed suicide.
Aristide Maillol (French, 1861 – 1944) was a French sculptor, painter, designer and illustrator. He began his career as a painter and tapestry designer, but after c. 1900 devoted himself to three-dimensional work, becoming one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century. He concentrated almost exclusively on the nude female figure in the round, consciously wishing to strip form of all literary associations and architectural context. Although inspired by the Classical tradition of Greek and Roman sculpture, his figures have all the elemental sensuousness and dignity associated with the Mediterranean peasant.
Maillol first intended to become a painter and went to Paris in 1881, where he lived in extreme poverty. Three years later the Ecole des Beaux-Arts finally accepted him as a pupil, where he began studies under Alexandre Cabanel. He found the teaching there discouraging and his early painted work was more strongly influenced by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Paul Gauguin, and the Nabis group which he joined around 1894; the Woman and the Wave (c. 1898; Paris, Petit Pal.) is directly influenced by Gauguin’s Ondine (1889; Cleveland, OH, Mus. A.). Maillol’s profile portraits, such as Profile of a Girl (c. 1890; Perpignan, Mus. Rigaud), are reminiscent of Puvis, and in his decorative approach to composition, rejection of depth and use of bright, flat areas of colour Maillol reveals his affinities with the Nabis. These qualities are even more apparent in The Washerwomen (c. 1890; Switzerland, priv. col.), although the monumentality of the Woman with a Parasol (c. 1892; Paris, Mus. d’Orsay) shows the influence of Quattrocento fresco painting.
Sharing the same interest in the decorative arts as the Nabis and inspired by Gothic tapestries in the Musée de Cluny, Paris—which he considered to be on a par with the paintings of Paul Cézanne—Maillol set up a tapestry workshop at Banyuls on the Mediterranean coast in 1893. His tapestries have groups of flat, decorative figures disposed across a shallow space, and they are coloured with bright vegetable dyes obtained from plants which Maillol himself sought out. The workshop, with support from Princess Bibesco, who bought the elaborate Music for a Bored Princess (1897; Copenhagen, Kstindustmus.) and several other tapestries, continued until c. 1900 when eye disease forced Maillol to discontinue. His portrait was painted at this time by his friend the Hungarian painter József Rippl-Rónai (for illustration see Rippl-rónai, józsef). Having also taken up ceramics he then turned The Wave into a bas-relief (destr.; plaster-cast, Paris, Mus. d’Orsay). In his spare time Maillol sculpted. His flat figures carved from small blocks of wood show the influence of the sinuous lines of Art Nouveau, especially in such works as The Dancer (1895; Paris, Mus. d’Orsay) and La Source (c. 1896; France, priv. col.), which later developed into more geometric, elongated forms, for example The Bather (1899; Amsterdam, Stedel. Mus.). He also modelled small, bold nude figurines in terracotta, aiming at simplicity and density of construction. The dealer Ambroise Vollard made numerous bronze casts of them (e.g. Leda, which was much admired by Auguste Rodin, and Women Wrestling; both 1900). In 1902 Vollard gave Maillol his first exhibition, in which the tapestries and statuettes figured prominently.
In 1900 Maillol began work on his first major sculpture, a Seated Woman for which his wife posed, which was later named La Méditerranée. The first version (New York, MOMA), finished in 1902, was very close to his model. He noted, however, that it was not sufficient ‘to have a model and to copy it. No doubt nature is the foundation of an artist’s labours…. But art does not lie in the copying of nature’ (Puig, 1965). Thus he resumed work and the definitive version was exhibited at the Salon d’Automne of 1905. He wanted the only meaning of this sculpture to reside in its formal beauty. With his acute sensitivity to form, he tightened the composition, which had been developed from a single viewpoint, into an almost perfect cube, simplifying the contours in the process. The sobriety and perfection of the form and gravity of La Méditerranée struck Octave Mirbeau and Maurice Denis as well as André Gide, who wrote (1905) of its ‘silence’. All three saw Maillol as a classic artist in the mould of Cézanne.
These qualities also attracted two collectors: Count Harry Kessler (Graf Henry Kessler) ordered a marble version of La Méditerranée (Winterthur, Samml. Oskar Reinhart) as early as 1905 (the French state did not do so until 1923: Paris, Mus. d’Orsay) and bought several bronzes, among them the Young Cyclist (1907) and Desire (1905–7). In 1908 Kessler took Maillol to Greece and c. 1910 commissioned woodcut illustrations for a new edition of Vergil’s Eclogues. The initial letters for the Eclogues, which was privately published in Weimar by Kessler in 1926–7, were cut by the English artist Eric Gill. Later books with woodcuts or lithographs by Maillol include Daphnis and Chloe (1937) by Longus and Paul Verlaine’s Chansons pour elle (1939). The Russian collector Ivan Morosov, his other patron, bought the first bronze cast of Pomona (example Paris, Jardin Tuileries) and commissioned three other figures in gilded bronze: Flora, Spring and Summer (all Moscow, Pushkin Mus. F.A.). Although Maillol did not altogether abandon painting, he increasingly concentrated on sculpture. Night (1909) was followed by Flora and Summer (1911), Ile de France (1910–25), Venus (1918–28), Nymphs of the Meadow (1930–37), the Memorial to Debussy (marble, 1930–33; Saint-Germain-en-Laye) and Harmony (1944), all of which are composed and harmonious nude female figures that contrast sharply with his unusually dynamic Action enchaînée (1905–8) and Mountain (1937).
Maillol was commissioned to execute a number of monuments, the first of which was poorly received. As part of the memorial to the revolutionary Louis-Auguste Blanqui the Action enchaînée was erected at Puget-Théniers, Alpes-Maritimes, despite protests from municipal councillors that it was too extreme. In 1925 the town of Aix-en-Provence refused the memorial to Cézanne (stone; Paris, Mus. d’Orsay), which a committee of artists headed by Frantz Jourdain had commissioned in 1912. Maillol also sculpted several war memorials. Three bas-reliefs were designed in the form of a triptych for the town of Banyuls (1933); of those memorials in the Pyrénées-Orientales, the Douleur (1922) in Céret is less original, echoing La Méditerranée, while the figures at Elne (1921) and Port-Vendres (1923) are recognizable as draped versions of Pomona and the memorial to Cézanne. The latter, reassembled after a sketch model of c. 1900, was also to serve as a point of departure for Air (1939; stone), part of the Monument to Airmen at Toulouse.
Maillol’s work is widely distributed in the form of bronzes and lead casts. In 1964–5, 18 large bronzes were placed in the Jardins du Carrousel, Paris, thanks to the initiative of André Malraux and Dina Vierny, Maillol’s last model. [Museum of Modern Art]