ART REVIEW : The Stylized Emotion of Barlach

Ernst Barlach is a German Expressionist for people who don’t like German Expressionism. His work is charged with emotion, but its sculptural form can be so stylized--so solidified and smoothed out--that it’s possible to appreciate Barlach’s work as art for form’s sake and to forget that he was a master at dealing with a wide range of human feeling.

A new show of Barlach’s prints, sculptures and books, at the County Museum of Art (to Aug. 28), shatters the stereotype of restraint. The selection of about 60 works from the Robert Gore Rifkind Collection rarely lets up as it plumbs the depths of religious experience, mysticism, alienation and Angst.

There may be a respite or two in porcelain sculptures of Russian lovers and beggars whose sorrowful feelings are mollified by flowing curves and glossy surfaces, but the prints and book illustrations constantly hammer away at dark themes and terrifying visions.

Most of the images are presented in thematic groups, pointing up the strength of the Rifkind collection, which boasts dozens of complete portfolios and hundreds of volumes of German Expressionist material. Each cluster of prints illustrates a play, poem or other literary work.

Woodcuts from “The Foundling” portfolio (1922), for example, illuminate scenes from a play about a grotesque baby who restores the hope of a starving community. While this group seems to admonish viewers to find virtue in the lowliest forms of life, prints for “The Head” (1919), a pessimistic poem by Reinhold von Walter, expose the belief that physical deformity may indicate inner depravity.

Said to be inspired by the 1918 Russian Revolution in Petrograd, this poem warns about becoming obsessed with the intellect and separating body from spirit. Beggars throw off the tyranny of imperial rule, but a pack of diabolical dwarfs rises to power. In one particularly striking woodcut, their leader--with a giant head and a tiny, boneless body--appears on a makeshift pedestal in a public square.

Even God is subject to human weaknesses, as we see in a series of woodcuts from the “Transformation of God” portfolio (1920-21). Barlach’s version departs from the book of Genesis by portraying God in seven guises. On the first day, he is airborne and radiant, with light beaming from his fingertips (both in a print and a related clay sculpture). On the last, he is an ancient, worn-out figure whose body droops into a rugged throne in a range of mountains. In between, God suffers the ravages of life on earth, turning up on crutches on the third day and exposing his distended belly when he succumbs to gluttony on the fifth.

The slashing strokes of Barlach’s woodcuts heighten the authority of his emotional visions and cast stark contrasts as slits of harsh light seem to slice through solid blackness. Lithographic images, on the other hand, often seem to materialize in an absence of light. Shadowy gray forms are barely perceptible on fields of close, dark values that symbolize a Northern view of sin as a relentless, all-encompassing condition.

In “The Dead Day,” a 1912 play illustrated by 27 lithographs, a mother kills a horse that is waiting to take her son away on a godly mission and then takes her own life. Spun into life as a mass of line, the woman drops her knife and falls onto her black shadow in one print and crouches over a bloodstain in another.

Barlach’s mystical view of mankind’s spiritual dilemmas may seem oppressively grim in this exhibition, but in fact his work is built upon contrasts of heaven and hell and it can portray an affecting tenderness. If poverty hangs on the shoulders of two women and death rides on horseback, we have only to look at “The New Day,” being blown into reality by two puffy-cheeked buglers in a 1932 lithograph.

Barlach was more inclined to an intellectual or mystical understanding of existence than most of his colleagues. History portrays him as a loner who gained inspiration for his mature work from a 1906 visit to Russia that put him in contact with downtrodden peasants.

In this exhibition we don’t see him raging against real wars, political realities or the timely particulars of earthly existence, as is typical of many other German Expressionists. His spiritual quest seems at once more personal and more universal. But it is difficult to imagine this work emerging in any other time and place than early 20th-Century Germany. As Barlach retreated from German Expressionism he also crystallized its profound concerns with the human condition.