SOURCE: "The Late Glory of Ernst Barlach (1870-1938)," in The South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. LXII, 1963, pp. 377-86.

In the following essay, Werner assesses Barlach's sculptures and reputation as an artist.

In the year 1888, when young Ernst Barlach entered the School of Applied Arts in Hamburg, beginning what was to be a fifty-year stretch of religious devotion to art, sculpture was at a very low ebb in Germany and, for that matter, all over Europe. In Berlin, all lucrative commissions went to Reinhold Begas who, with his disciples, created huge monuments that combine theatricality of pose with a slavish imitation of nature, including the most faithful treatment of banal accessories. There were, however, trends among the younger artists and patrons of art to replace the era's false pathos, blended with a passion for photographic verisimilitude, by an art that would once more allow its creator to make full use...