Lot 11 Dα

In the years following his studies at the Düsseldorf academy of art from 1901 to 1906, Wilhelm Lehmbruck was seeking new and appropriately modern expressive possibilities for his sculptures. He found decisive sources of inspiration in Hans von Marées but, above all, in the French and Belgian sculptors Constantin Meunier, Auguste Rodin and Georges Minne. Accordingly, Lehmbruck regularly spent time in Paris from 1906, and he moved there in 1910. In the French metropolis he established personal contact with Rodin, met Aristide Maillol and introduced his definitive, austere style with his “Große Stehende” of 1910/11.
“Mädchen mit aufgestütztem Bein” was created on the threshold of Lehmbruck’s elongated and introverted sculptures. This bronze also depicts a standing female figure but, unlike the works that would follow, the woman has assumed a complex, twisting pose. While her raised leg has been shifted to the left, her upper body is turned to the right and her head moves back in the opposite direction again. This unstable pose makes “Mädchen mit aufgestelltem Bein” reminiscent of a “figura serpentinata”, the twisting figures of the late Renaissance in Italy. However, there is an even more pronounced link with the French sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, who had become famous through his dynamic sculptures at the Paris Opera. Taking in all of these influences, Lehmbruck has created a rare, sensually playful nude whose introverted gaze already points ahead to later works like the “Große Sinnende” (1913).