Lot 221 Dα

Ernst Barlach's images of musicians show individuals absorbed within themselves, meditatively listening in on their own inner being. The “Singender Klosterschüler” represents precisely this type: In a still and collected pose, he concentrates on intensely grasping his own inward experience.
The Lübeck museum director Carl Georg Heise visited Ernst Barlach in Güstrow in 1929 with the intention of purchasing a work for his town. At that point the plan to furnish the blind niches of the medieval St Catherine's Church in Lübeck with over-life-sized figures was developed. The church had been converted into an exhibition space upon Heise's initiative. Titled “Gemeinschaft der Heiligen” a figural frieze consisting of 16 niche figures was to be created. Barlach wanted to utilise a number of preliminary designs from prior years for them: motifs which, to some extent, thematise fundamental dispositions of human existence more than they present the ecclesiastical canon.
The large number and massive format of the figures repeatedly led Barlach to have doubts about the project's success. Financing this ambitious plan also represented a great challenge and - in combination with conservationist concerns as well as general reactionary-nationalist resentment towards Barlach's work - this was the reason why only three figures of the “Gemeinschaft der Heiligen” were finally carried out by the artist (cf. Elisabeth Lauer/Volker Probst, Ernst Barlach: Das plastische Werk; Werkverzeichnis II, Güstrow 2006, pp. 40 ff.): “Bettler”, “Singender Klosterschüler” and “Frau im Wind” (Lauer 446, 489 and 515). The present sculpture in the round was created as a bronze cast based on a preliminary scale model of the approximately two-metre niche figure made of clinker masonry for Lübeck's St Catherine's Church.