Nina Lübbren

Before Modernism, narrative painting was one of the most acclaimed and challenging modes of picture-making in Western art, yet by the early twentieth century storytelling had all but disappeared from ambitious art. France was a key player in both the dramatic rise and the controversial demise of narrative art. This is the first book to analyse French painting in relation to narrative, from Poussin in the early seventeenth to Gauguin in the late nineteenth century. Thirteen original essays shed light on key moments and aspects of narrative and French painting through the study of artists such as Nicolas Poussin, Charles Le Brun, Jacques-Louis David, Paul Delaroche, Gustave Moreau, and Paul Gauguin. Using a range of theoretical perspectives, the authors study key issues such as temporality, theatricality, word-and-image relations, the narrative function of inanimate objects, the role played by viewers, and the ways in which visual narrative has been bound up with history painting. The book offers a fresh look at familiar material, as well as studying some little-known works of art, and reveals the centrality and complexity of narrative in French painting over the course of three centuries.

Why did thousands of nineteenth-century artists leave the established urban centers of culture to live and work in the countryside? By 1900, there were over eighty rural artists’ communities across northern and central Europe. This is the first book to offer a critical analysis of this important phenomenon on a Europe-wide basis. Nina Lübbren combines close visual readings of little-known paintings with an innovative multidisciplinary approach, drawing on sociology, geography, and theories of tourism.

Rural artists’ colonies have been unjustly neglected by an art history preoccupied with the urban avant-garde. Yet these communities hatched some of the most exciting innovations of late nineteenth-century painting. Moreover, the practices and images of rural artists articulated central concerns of urban middle-class audiences, in particular the yearning for a nostalgia-imbued life that was considered authentic, premodern, and immersed in nature. Paradoxically, it was precisely this perception that placed artists’ colonies firmly within modernity, mainly through their contribution to an emergent mass tourism.

In 1983, Stephanie Barron's seminal exhibition on German Expressionist Sculpture privileged the wooden sculpture of painters Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Erich Heckel as epitomes of the Expressionist aesthetic.  These roughly-hewn wooden figurines reimagined the traditional material of wood, associated in Germany with the limewood sculptors of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, as indices of primitivist yearnings for a non-classicist, pre-academic 'authenticity' of sculptural expression.  However, these wooden sculptures formed only a relatively small proportion of the sculptural output in Germany during the years 1910 to 1930.  The majority of sculptures continued to be made in the conventional materials of bronze and stone, with some cast in the modern medium of artificial stone.

This paper considers the role which material played in the production and reception of German Expressionist sculpture.  It considers the ideologies associated with each of the principal media - bronze, stone, wood, plaster - and re-examines the extent to which the 'truth to materials' claim was followed by sculptors in their actual works.  The German language distinguishes between Skulptur (works produced by direct carving in stone or wood) and Plastik (works made by casting in bronze from a model built up in plaster or clay), and this difference occasioned a lively debate about the different functions assigned to each medium and each stage of the material process of making three-dimensional Bildwerke.  The paper pays particular attention to critical reception by critics, specifically the kinds of language used to describe techniques associated with individual materials and the peculiarly Expressionist metaphorisation of matter.

The paper focuses on sculptures by Emy Roeder (wood), Gela Forster (plaster, stone) and Wilhelm Lehmbruck (plaster, bronze, poured concrete).

Gela Forster was a founding member of the 'Dresden Secession Group 1919' ('Dresdner Sezession Gruppe 1919'), one of Germany's key revolutionary artists' groups launched after the Great War and in the first months of the Weimar Republic.  Forster was the group's only woman member and, initially, its only sculptor.  She showed three sculptures at the group's first exhibition in April 1919 at the art gallery Emil Richter on Dresden's Prager Strasse.  These three sculptures, all of them torsos, were: 

•  Erwachen or Awakening (an archaic female figure);
•  Der Mann or The Man (a male nude with a screaming mouth);
•  and Empfängnis or Conception (a semi-abstract pregnant woman).

All three sculptures survive only in photographs.  They were exhibited one more time, at the Freie Secession in Berlin in May-June of 1919; nothing is known of their whereabouts after that.  No information survives on the works' dimensions or medium.    At least six contemporary reviews mentioned Forster's work; and two lengthy articles devoted entirely to Gela Forster appeared in the Expressionist journals Menschen and Neue Blätter für Kunst und Dichtung, penned by the poets Alfred Günther and Theodor Däubler, respectively.  Forster exhibited a few more sculptures in the following three years but after the initial high-profile reception, the artist's work was more or less forgotten until it came to the attention of a wider public by its inclusion in the exhibition German Expressionist Sculpture (curated by Stephanie Barron in Los Angeles, 1983). 

My paper today focuses on Forster's work Conception as an articulation of revolutionary utopia, an engagement with Weimar reproductive politics, and a distinctive take on contemporary debates on the formal and expressive distinctiveness of sculpture.  I will reverse the usual art-historical order of proceeding from a description of the work and a discussion of its artist to broader interpretive moves, and instead approach the sculpture from the outside in, as it were, proceeding along stepping stones defined by diverse angles on the 'body' -- because that is what we have here:  a sculpted body and a sculptural body.  I start with the work's immediate historical context -- the 'Dresden Secession Group 1919' -- and its broader historical context -- women's engagement with debates around maternity. I then zero in on the actual work itself as an example of Expressionist sculpture.  So my paper will move from the revolutionary body to the real women's body to the Expressionist body of the sculpture, to end, finally, with the disappearance of the sculpted body:  Forster's work is, crucially, available to us only in the form of photographs.  An epilogue will consider the disappearance of the artist, Gela Forster herself from historical awareness, and what this means for our own work as art historians.

In the 1910s-20s, Renée Sintenis produced highly popular small-scale, ‘table-top’ bronze figurines,
depicting sportsmen, horses, deer and other animals. In co-ordination with her dealer Alfred
Flechtheim, she successfully positioned herself within the commercial and critical art worlds of
Weimar Germany as a modern woman who combined sculpture (marked as ‘masculine’) and the
decorative (marked as ‘feminine’) in her practice and her person. Flechtheim advertised Sintenis’s
works as ‘charming things’, and the artist herself did not want her sculptures to have a
‘monumental effect’. At the same time, critics emphasised that Sintenis never ‘sank’ to the level of
‘applied art’.
By contrast, Milly Steger’s equally successful professional trajectory took the opposite tack: her
pre-1914 larger-than-life sculptures made for the Hagen theatre façade, are integrated in and
subservient to a building ensemble. Ernst Vetterlein, the theatre’s architect, wrote that Steger’s
female nudes appear to ‘grow from the architecture’ and form ‘part of the whole as ornament’.
Steger’s nudes generated controversy precisely because of their public, monumental and
gendered character.
This paper addresses the cross-fertilisation between free-standing figurative sculpture and the
decorative in the work of Sintenis and Steger in Germany between 1910 and 1933. The way these
two sculptors managed their careers as a balancing act between divergent notions of the
ornamental, the monumental and the feminine reveals an under-researched aspect of the
historically contested and gendered field of the decorative within modernist avant-garde sculptural
production, practice and reception