Edwin Paul Scharff

Alfred Flechtheim and Edwin Paul Scharff

The German sculptor and graphic artist studied painting at the Königliche Akademie der bildenden Künste in Munich from 1904–06. In 1913 he was one of the co-founders of the Münchener Neue Sezession. Trips to Paris in 1907/08 and through Italy and Spain had a strong impact on him. Inspired by Michelangelo, El Greco and Hans von Marées he created large-format paintings with religious subjects. A second stay to Paris in 1912 and 1913 where he took a close interest in Cubism also had a strong influence on him. It was here that he completed his first large-scale sculpture. After World War I he concentrated entirely on sculpting and was influenced by Picasso and Braque, but more importantly by the work of Archipenko, Lipchitz, Duchamp-Villon and Lehmbruck. Despite the use of Cubist shapes, a naturalistic rendition of nature and an orientation towards the exemplary works of Greek Antiquity also played a major role. As a result Scharff developed his own formal language in the 1920s and ’30s that exudes a monumental calm and timelessness, characterised by a formal coherence, clear tectonics and simplified forms. Apart from nudes and works based on the ‘horse and rider’ motif he created a number of busts of well-known figures such as Heinrich Mann, Annie Mewes and Max Liebermann.

Scharff was appointed professor in Berlin in 1920 and was elected Vice President of the Deutscher Künstlerbund in 1927. He was forced to take immediate leave in 1933 on account of his political involvement in the Munich Soviet Republic, his wife’s Jewish ancestry and for supposedly neglecting his students at the Landeskunstschule, and sent to Düsseldorf. He thought he could protect his family and safeguard his threatened existence by becoming a member of the NSDAP. Up until 1939 Scharff was in fact allowed to carry on working but a complete professional ban was imposed on him in 1940. 48 of his works were confiscated or destroyed and his family was bombed out of their home on several occasions during the war. Just shortly before the end of the war, a squad of SS soldiers carried out a concerted attack on Scharff’s sculptures. As he had not been allowed to carry out his profession, the works he had made over the previous ten years or so only existed in the form of plaster models. They were virtually all destroyed. After the war the artist taught and worked in Hamburg until his death in 1955.

Alfred Flechtheim supported Edwin Scharff not least of all due to his Cubist formal language and had dealt with his graphic works and sculptures since the beginning of the 1920s. He presented the artists work on several occasions in ‘Der Querschnitt’ between 1926 and 1932 and showed several works at three group exhibitions in Berlin and Düsseldorf.