Ernest Barlach Biography
Ernst Barlach (Wedel, 2 January 1870 – Rostock, 24 October 1938) was a German sculptor and writer, belonging to the expressionist movement. Barlach was born in Wedel in northern Germany, the eldest of four children of the couple Johanna Luise Barlach and the doctor Georg Barlach. He attended his first courses of study in Ratzeburg. He was fatherless during this period, in 1884. Barlach subsequently moved to Hamburg in 1888 to continue his studies at the School of Arts and Crafts. After three years he entered the Dresden Academy (Königlichen Akademie der bildenden Künste zu Dresden') as a student of Robert Diez. Precisely in this period he created one of his best sculptures entitled Die Krautpflückerin. In 1895 he perfected his knowledge at the Académie Julian in Paris, although he remained skeptical of the widespread tendency at the time to imitate French artists. In these years, he turned his attention towards Van Gogh and was influenced by Jugendstil and therefore Art Nouveau. For five years starting from 1897 he collaborated as a designer with the magazine Jugend and began a career as a ceramics teacher. Due to alternating commercial fortunes and for educational purposes, he moved to Russia in 1906, where he felt the charm of local artistic trends, which ended up further exalting Barlach's symbolist and expressionist background. From this moment on, themes concerning farmers, the poor, popular mysticism, solidarity, archaic religiosity were included in his works. Other elements characterizing the contents of his works were the German Middle Ages and Gothic art. In 1909 he stayed for ten months in Italy, in Florence, where he was attracted above all by Giotto and the plastic works of Arnolfo di Cambio. After a brief period of enthusiasm for war, already during the First World War, the artist resumed his pacifist line. Barlach's popularity increased in the post-war period to the point of allowing him to enter the prestigious Academy of Prussia (1919) and that of Munich in 1925. In these years his intense literary activity also continued, both appreciated and rewarded, just think to the Kleist Prize received for the drama entitled Die Sündflut (1924), in which the author projected his personal mysticism and to the expressionist drama Der blaue Boll, which introduced the reader to murky events resolved with a spiritual flowering of the protagonists. Due to his pacifist position, the Nazi regime decided to ban him and implemented the confiscation or destruction of his works. In addition to his individual and group sculptures made primarily in wood, Barlach produced eight expressionist plays, two novellas and an autobiography. Barlach's art highlighted a predilection for squared shapes and stylized lines, capable of exasperating the meeting point between medieval asceticism and cubist rules.
