Lot 229 Dα

“This much I've recognised”, wrote Barlach to the scholar of German literature Friedrich Düsel in 1891, “that in sculpture the antique spirit (I don't demand antique forms, as in the case of Thorvaldsen, but the simple grand spirit and purity and strictest correctness of the forms, particularly the drapery, of which no modern painter and much less sculptor has any idea - beauty, grandeur, the flow of lines [...]), the orientation towards the monumental have to be the driving forces.” (Ernst Barlach to Friedrich Düsel on 13 June 1891, in: Briefe I, 1888-1924, Munich 1968, no. 45, p. 165). Over 35 years later - in the meantime Barlach had successfully completed his studies in Dresden as a master-pupil of Robert Diez (1844-1922), first travelled to Paris in 1895/96, pursued (in a certain sense) a departure from the classicist ideal and glorified the omnipresent French naturalism of the late 19th century - Barlach conceived one of his most widely disseminated figures, the “Singender Mann”. This was not the only work with which Barlach met the challenge he had once laid down for himself in purest contemplation: an austere formal composition, simple drapery falling in loose folds, reduced to almost Cubist forms and nonetheless with an elegant ornamental arc in the “flow of lines”.
A physiognomy that had come to characterise the artist's work conveys a distinctive concept and independently responds to an iconographic gesture, a moving statement. Barlach may have been pursuing a sacral, perhaps also liturgical, background with the delightful, leaned-back and relaxed pose and, with the full-throated singing of the man, he cast a figure which he used to describe as a “human situation in its nakedness between heaven and earth” (Ernst Barlach, Ein selbsterzähltes Leben, Kritische Textausgabe, ed. by Ulrich Bubrowski, Leipzig 1997, p. 72).
After the death of his gallerist Paul Cassirer in 1926, Alfred Flechtheim became responsible for handling Barlach's sculptural work and encouraged the sculptor, who had been “fixated” on wood up to that time, to increasingly utilise bronze to realise his sculptures. Thus, after the 1927 monument in Güstrow, the “Singender Mann” was among the first sculptures that Barlach conceived with “passion and conviction” in what was a new material for him.