Wilhelm Lehmbruck

The German sculptor and graphic artist Wilhelm Lehmbruck grew up in a mining family as one of eight children. He discovered his passion for sculpting and painting at an early age. He studied under Karl Janssen at the Düsseldorfer Kunstakademie from 1901–06, initially working on Neo-Classicist figures before developing his own expressive, elongated formal language.

Inspired by Rodin and Maillol, Lehmbruck moved to Paris in 1910 where he made his most important sculptures. In 1911 Lehmbruck found his own style within Expressionist sculpture with his Kniende and was the only German sculptor invited to the Armory Show in New York in 1913. Today, his large, greatly elongated and expressive female figures are among the sculptor’s most outstanding works. During World War I, Lehmbruck initially worked as a medical orderly in a military hospital in Berlin and was later a war artist in Strasbourg. Psychologically effected by the suffering brought about by the war, Lehmbruck created Der Gestürzte (Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich) in 1915 as an anti-war monument and an allegory of his own life. After the war, Lehmbruck suffered from severe depression as a result of the pain he had suffered and unrequited love. He committed suicide on 25 March, 1919 in his studio in Berlin.

Alfred Flechtheim exhibited Lehmbruck’s works in his galleries on several occasions. The contact came through Lehmbruck’s connection to artists at the Café du Dôme and his presence at the Sonderbund exhibitions in 1910 and 1911 in Düsseldorf, as well as the trail-blazing Internationale Kunstausstellung des Sonderbundes westdeutscher Kunstfreunde und Künstler in 1912 in Cologne where Lehmbruck was presented as both a painter and a sculptor. Lehmbruck’s and Flechtheim’s paths crossed on several occasions – not least of all thanks to the art dealer’s friendship with Paul Cassirer who represented Lehmbruck as a gallery owner and who supported Flechtheim as a business partner.