Edwin Scharff

Edwin Scharff first studied painting in Munich before turning to sculpting in Paris from 1911 onwards as a self-taught sculptor. In 1913, he was one of the founding members of the Munich New Secession and in the 1920s, he worked as a professor at the Berlin College of Fine Arts. He produced portrait busts of contemporaries, such as Max Liebermann, Lovis Corinth or Heinrich Mann, and some works in marble, including the group of lovers titled “Pastorale”, which were only completed in 1939. In 1926, the commission to immortalise the President of the Reich at that time, Paul von Hindenburg, in a marble bust was a milestone of his artistic success. The “Rossebändiger” in Düsseldorf (1936-39) belong, amongst others, to the series of Scharff’s public monuments. During National Socialism, the artist was relieved of his position and he also had to eventually relinquish the subsequent professorship at the Düsseldorf Academy due to an employment ban in 1937. More than 40 of his works were destroyed in the course of the “degenerate art” campaign. Rehabilitated after the war, Scharff was appointed a position at the Academy in Hamburg which he kept until his death. Scharff’s artistic beginnings lie in painting; stylistically he was inspired by Hans von Marées and Arnold Böcklin, among others. His sculptures are committed to a classical vocabulary which processes stimuli from Aristide Maillol’s and Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s oeuvre. At the same time, in the oeuvre of the second decade mostly cubist influences were asserted, both in painting as in sculpture. Calm, clearly defined volumes and reduced, slightly abstracted stylised forms, occasionally enlivened by traits of Cubism, characterise the oeuvre which is thematically determined by riders and horses, lovers and single female figures. The artistic late work is characterised by a liquefaction of shapes and contours. Scharff’s oeuvre, which was represented at the Documenta I in Kassel in 1959, constitutes an important contribution to modern German sculpture.