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#10

Kneeling Woman

Lehmbruck, Wilhelm (1881-1919) | Sculptor

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Her head is turned to one side, looking down. Her eyes are closed. Her right arm is bent, her hand in front of her breast – almost a gesture of humility. She seems entirely self-absorbed, oblivious of the world around her.

Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s sculpture dates from 1911. At that time he was living in Paris. He had intensively studied works by Auguste Rodin and Aristide Maillol, but was already moving away from their influence to create his own formal vocabulary. Listen to curator Astrid Nielsen on Lehmbruck’s Woman Kneeling:

"If this figure were to stand up, she would be around 222 centimetres – over seven feet tall. So when Lehmbruck first showed this work, it was very controversial. And since the figure’s elongated limbs are miles away from our natural anatomy, they came in for a lot of criticism.”


But Lehmbruck was not interested in a mimetic copy of natural body shapes.

“What is also new here is the idea – already inherent in Rodin – of expressionist sculpture. In other words, these figures only represent themselves and what they want to say.”


Lehmbruck’s Woman Kneeling is not carved in stone, but cast in stone – a technique extremely popular in France at that time. For a stone cast, crushed stone is mixed with water and cement and poured into a negative mould. After hardening, the cast is removed from the mould and finished by hand. The stone cast technique allows numerous copies of a sculpture to be made. The Woman Kneeling on show here was actually cast in 1920, the year after Lehmbruck died. This is the only stone cast Woman Kneeling still in Europe.
 

Material & Technique
Cast stone
Museum
Skulpturensammlung
Dating
Model 1911, cast after the original form, 1920
Inventory number
ZV 2840
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