Seated Girl (Sitzende Mädchen)

A promising student at the art academies of his native Germany, Lammert lived in Paris from 1912–13, and there he met the Ukranian sculptor Alexander Archipenko and other modernist artists residing in the city at the time. Seated Girl shows the impact of this Parisian period on the young sculptor, especially in the way the human figure is reduced to simple shapes that do not so much describe as recall the parts of the body. Lammert exhibited two related large-scale standing female nudes in a major exhibition in Cologne in 1914, the year after he made this piece in glazed ceramic, and the success of these works helped launch his successful career in 1920s Germany. The artist ultimately rejected this modernist abstraction for socialist figuration: after World War II, he settled in East Germany, where he received major commissions for commemorative monumental sculptures in a very different heroic, realist style.