The Princeton University Art Museum presents “Myth and Modernity: Ernst Barlach’s Images of the Nibelungen and Faust ,” on view February 21⁊une 7. This is the only US venue for the exhibition.
The exhibition conveys the versatility and narrative power of the German sculptor, printmaker and playwright Ernst Barlach (1870‱938) through several of the artist’s sculptures, as well as woodcuts depicting the Walpurgis Night scene in Goethe’s Faust and drawings illustrating the climatic end of the medieval epic of the Nibelungen, an evil family possessing a magic hoard of gold.
“Myth and Modernity” represents the first time Barlach’s cycle of drawings on the Nibelungen will be on view to an American audience. The exhibition was organized with the cooperation of the Ernst Barlach Foundation in Güstrow, Germany, where it will become part of an expanded presentation next year.
The artist’s graphic interpretations from the 1920s of two cycles of German literary classics, 20 woodcuts illustrating the Walpurgis Night scene of Goethe’s Faust and the powerful series of 17 charcoal drawings and studies inspired by the tale of the Nibelungen are the cornerstones of the exhibition. While Faust is a classic text well known in this country, the Nibelungen epic is less familiar to the American public, primarily known in America as the inspiration for a 1924 silent film by Fritz Lang and most of all for parts of Richard Wagner’s operatic Ring Cycle .
Barlach was a major figure in German art during the last years of the empire and in the Weimar Republic. Barlach’s sculptures and drawings are held in several major American museums and collections, but his singular interpretation on Modernism is still not as well known in this country as it is in Europe.
As independent in his political beliefs as in his work, he defended the autonomy of the individual, and was opposed to any form of ideological constraints, whether of the left or the right. During the Third Reich, Barlach’s work was removed from museums and art galleries, some of it was destroyed, a volume of his drawings was confiscated by the Gestapo and shown in the exhibition of Degenerate Art.
The “Nibelungen” drawings and some of the sculptures are on loan from the Barlach Foundation in Güstrow, Germany. Other works, including prints from Goethe’s Faust and sculptures in wood and bronze, are drawn from German and American private collections, as well as the Princeton University Art Museum. Among the few works in the exhibition not by Barlach is a bronze sculpture created by his friend Käthe Kollwitz (1867‱945), in homage to the master at the time of his death.
The exhibition will be accompanied by an illustrated brochure written by Peter Paret, and produced by the museum.
A symposium will take place March 28, which will explore issues of art and politics raised by Barlach’s work.
For more information, http://artmuseum.princeton.edu or 609-258-3788.
