A Haunted Man

ONE of the many tragedies of World War I was that it ruined a generation of artists and poets on both sides of the trenches. For every minor cult figure like Rupert Brooke, polishing his gung-ho stanzas and dying of a mosquito bite en route to the Dardanelles, a dozen real poets like Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen were cut down. Georges Braque was shot and lived, but the war deprived the 20th century of the mature work of Franz Marc, August Macke, Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Umberto Boccioni and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, as well as that of a young sculptor named Gaudier-Brzeska who might well have rivaled Brancusi in his contribution to modernism. One of the saddest casualties was a German who never fought, the sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbruck. "Who stayed behind after these murders?" he wrote in January of 1918, after moving to Switzerland to escape military service:

Who survived this bloody sea? I step across this stubbled field And look around at the crop Which murder butchered horribly. My friends lie all around me, My brothers are no longer here ... You, who prepared so much death, Have you no death for me?

The question was not wholly rhetorical. On March 25, 1919, depressed by a crisis in his own work and by the trauma of the lost war, Lehmbruck killed himself. He was 38. Ever since, the German art world has tended to the view that Lehmbruck's was an exemplary suicide--that, as Critic Reinhold Heller puts it, "his death became a supplication for peace and a sacrificial self-immolation in a world which had declared war on art."

Fortunately, Lehmbruck's truncated output survived the Third Reich --though Hitler considered it, along with most expressionist art, degenerate --and in 1964 a special Lehmbruck museum opened in his native city, Duisburg. But though revered in Germany, Lehmbruck is not well known in America. To rectify this, the National Gallery in Washington has organized a Lehmbruck retrospective, which will run until Aug. 13, thus giving Americans a chance to assess the wistful and curiously poignant work of this haunted man.

The mark of Lehmbruck's sculpture is its inwardness. Lank, elongated and contemplative, his figures seem involved in a degree of soul searching that inevitably recalls the earlier romantic artists of 19th century Germany. Lehmbruck was an excellent generalizer but an undistinguished portraitist. He seldom made an individual's face. The earliest known Lehmbruck, a bust of himself done in 1898 at the age of 17, is an exception to this. But it is, as one might expect, a rudimentary effort, stiff and mute. Fifteen years later, when he made his Head of an Old Woman, the image succeeded less as a portrait than as a meditation on time: the plaster face is weathered like an old root, its forms blurred under the delicate accumulated fingermarks.

"I believe," Lehmbruck proclaimed, "that we are again approaching a truly great art and that soon we shall give expression to our time through a monumental contemporary style." He was right--the irony being that this promise was not fulfilled by his own sculpture. There is scarcely one of his works that does not suffer in some measure from the tension between Lehmbruck's large desires and his extreme sensitivity, which resulted in a frequent indecision about surface modeling as well as a troublesome theatricality of facial expression and gesture. It is as though the psychological burden of being a 20th century man militated against the possibility of a grand-scale art based on the human figure--which, in fact, it does.

Lehmbruck was a finely responsive modeler, but he rarely contrived to give his nudes the unabashed, vigorous monumentality of Maillol's. Qualified by unease, bowed down by shame, indecision or guilt, they avert their gaze and seem on the point of flight or evaporation. The result was a fervently decorative and mannered style of representing the nude, which owed a great deal to Modigliani. A sculpture like Seated Girl, 1913-14, with its long geometrical curve running from toe through thigh and torso to the impossible declination of the neck, is a fascinating prediction of Art Deco: coarser variants of this woman subsequently infested the mantelpieces of the late 1920s.

What direction would Lehmbruck's art have taken if he had lived? Perhaps toward the kind of immobile, space-arresting thinness that Giacometti achieved. But that seems unlikely, for there is an intrinsic sentimentality to Lehmbruck's work that almost precludes the possibility of such absolute concentration.

The sum effect of the National Gallery's show is that the merits of Lehmbruck's last years were in form and the failures were in expression. Isolate the head of Praying Girl, 1918, and it is unremarkable. What makes the sculpture live is the brilliantly worked-out series of triangular voids defined by the armpits, the forearms and the slender torso; the body becomes a drawing in space.

So, too, with the 1913 Rising Youth.

Only a hair separates that Hamlet-like image of self-debate from the vulgarities of Nazi youthcult art; the exaggerated slenderness verges on caricature but nowhere falls into it, and to look at the structural grace of the body, with its bent leg thrusting into the pelvis like a flying buttress, is to realize how well Lehmbruck could surround a figure with active space instead of merely displacing air with bronze. Perhaps if Lehmbruck had lived to reconcile the contradictions in his art, he would have been -- against his expectations -- a better abstract sculptor than he was a figurative one.

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