SOURCE: "Ernst Barlach," in The Kenyan Review, Vol. XXIV, No. 4, Autumn, 1962, pp. 627-43.

In the following essay, Werner presents an overview of Barlach s reputation as an artist and writer.

The veneration of the sculptor and printmaker Ernst Barlach (1870-1938) in Central Europe has, so far, not spread much beyond the German-speaking nations. Britain's Art Council brought a large number of his works in 1961 from Germany (primarily Hamburg) to London, where they were viewed with respect rather than admiration. For one thing, there is in Barlach nothing of the non-figurative trend that has finally achieved a vogue in London. This trend was repugnant to Barlach. In a letter of 1911, to the publisher Reinhold Piper, he wrote:

.. . my artistic language is the human figure or the object through which or in which man lives, suffers, rejoices, feels, thinks. . . . The things that arrest my attention are what a human being...