Standing Peasant Woman (Steppenweib), 1921

Legs apart, slightly backward leaning, with arms hanging down beside her body and huge work-worn hands sticking out of too-short sleeves, leaning a little sideways as if swaying, the corpulent female figures stands in peasant clothes looking straight as us with her wide coarse face. Working like in the tradition of Gothic wood carvers, the German sculptor and painter Ernst Barlach (1870–1938) models his bronze statues of humans characterized by architectural closedness, soft curves and cubic basic shapes while appearing to have something strangely odd and mildly humanistic about them. Barlach’s sculptural vocabulary is informed by an attitude imbued with religiosity, spirituality, and a penchant for a metaphysical word-view. Despite its appearance of timelessness above and beyond stylistic categorization, Barlach’s work was classified as “degenerate art” and rejected in the Nazi Third Reich.

MH, 2021