PRINCETON, NJ.- The Princeton University Art Museum presents Myth and Modernity: Ernst Barlach's Images of the Nibelungen and Faust, on view from through June 7, 2009. The exhibition conveys the versatility and narrative power of the German sculptor, printmaker, and playwright Ernst Barlach (1870-1938) through several of the artist's sculptures, as well as woodcuts depicting the Walpurgis Night scene in Goethe's Faust and drawings illustrating the climatic end of the medieval epic of the Nibelungen.

The Princeton University Art Museum's showing of Myth and Modernity represents the first time Barlach's cycle of drawings on the Nibelungen are on view to an American audience. The exhibition was organized with the cooperation of the Ernst Barlach Foundation in Güstrow, Germany, where it will become part of an expanded presentation next year. Myth and Modernity was conceived by Peter Paret, professor emeritus, Institute for Advanced Study, and organized by Calvin Brown, associate curator of prints and drawings, and Professor Paret.

“The exhibition’s major examples of Barlach’s sculpture and graphics provide a good introduction to the work of one of the great artists of the twentieth-century,” said Peter Paret.

The artist’s graphic interpretations from the 1920s of two cycles of German literary classics, twenty woodcuts illustrating the Walpurgis Night scene of Goethe’s Faust and the powerful series of seventeen charcoal drawings and studies inspired by the tale of the Nibelungen, are the cornerstones of the exhibition. While Faust is a classic text well known in this country, the Nibelungen epic is less familiar to the American public, primarily known in America as the inspiration for a 1924 silent film by Fritz Lang and most of all for parts of Richard Wagner’s operatic Ring Cycle. This epic poem of love, honor, and revenge was first written down circa A.D. 1200. Several manuscripts, discovered in the late 1700s, were translated into modern German and by the nineteenth century became well known throughout Germany. The Nibelungen epic, considered a Germanic counterpart to the epics of Homer in modern Greek history, has continually played an important role in German culture and history down to the Third Reich and beyond.

“Although the artist's importance has been long recognized abroad, this is the first monographic exhibition devoted to Barlach to be held in the United States in over thirty-five years. Myth and Modernity: Ernst Barlach's Images of the Nibelungen and Faust is a perfect exhibition to be held at the Princeton University Art Museum, as it will be of interest to students and scholars across many disciplines throughout the university community,” commented Calvin Brown

Ernst Barlach was a major figure in German art during the last years of the empire and in the Weimar Republic. Barlach's sculptures and drawings are held in several major American museums and collections, but his singular interpretation on modernism is still not as well known in this country as it is in Europe. As independent in his political beliefs as in his work, he defended the autonomy of the individual, and was opposed to any form of ideological constraints, whether of the left or the right. His drawings of the Nibelungen take the beauty and power of the epic seriously, but refuse to glorify its characters’ bloodlust and unquestioned loyalty to the death, which nationalists and National Socialists elevated as models for the German people. During the Third Reich, Barlach’s work was removed from museums and art galleries, some of it was destroyed, a volume of his drawings was confiscated by the Gestapo, and shown in the exhibition of Degenerate Art.

The Nibelungen drawings and some of the sculptures are on loan from the Barlach Foundation in Güstrow, Germany. Other works, including prints from Goethe’s Faust and sculptures in wood and bronze, are drawn from German and American private collections, as well as the Princeton University Art Museum. Among the few works in the exhibition not by Barlach is a bronze sculpture created by his friend Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945), in homage to the master at the time of his death.