SOURCE: "Plasticity in Language: Some Notes on the Prose Style of Ernst Barlach," in The Modern Language Review, Vol. XLIX, No. 4, October, 1954, pp. 451-60.

In the following essay, McFarlane discusses Barlach's ability to move easily between verbal and visual communication in his writing and sculpture.

As a young man of nineteen, Ernst Barlach had no hesitation in arranging the representational—or, as he called them, the 'counterfeiting'—arts in a strict order of precedence, a hierarchy of values that moreover survived the brash self-certainty of youth and guided him throughout his life:

Als Bildhauer muss mir von den drei Arten, auf welche man das Leben und Treiben der Menschen abkonterfeit, der Plastik, dem Malen und Zeichnen und der Erzählung, die erste natürlich am geläufigsten und liebsten sein. . . . Nun kann mir aber die Plastik nicht ganz genügen, deshalb zeichne ich, und weil mir auch das...