Biography
The son of a master painter with an interest in art, he was born in Waldheim in Saxony in 1877. He studied painting and drawing from 1891-98 in Dresden, Munich and at the Académie Julian in Paris.
In 1898-1901, he began modeling rather by accident; the sculptor Louis Tuaillon gave him assistance in technical matters.
In 1902 Kolbe lived first in Leipzig before moving to Berlin in 1904. He was accepted into the Berlin Secession and represented by the city's most important art dealer, Paul Cassirer. In 1905 he was one of the first fellows of the Villa Romana, Florence.
Around 1911/12 Kolbe found an independent sculptural formal language. The main work of this phase is the Dancer (National Gallery, Berlin).
After the war Kolbe took a leading position in Berlin: already in 1918 he had been awarded the title of professor; in 1919 he became a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts and in the same year chairman of the Free Secession, the most important artists' community in Berlin at that time.
Kolbe's style changed again in the mid-1920s, at the same time as the political and economic calm of the Weimar Republic. The sculptor refrained from stylizations and unnatural proportions; instead, he modeled athletically moving female figures with sketchy, loose surfaces.
The greatest break in Kolbe's work was caused in 1927 by the tragic death of his wife; after that, he no longer created cheerful girl figures, but instead sculptures that expressed sadness and abandonment.
Kolbe's human figures of the 1930s were to act as models in the sense of Nietzsche. Whereas the sculptor had previously preferred moving figures, serenely standing figures now predominate.
With the collapsed figure Der Befreite (1945) Kolbe reflected the shock of the Germans after the end of the war. The artist, who suffered from cancer and declining eyesight in the last decade of his life, was active to the end. He died in Berlin in November 1947.
Georg Kolbe © 1940 unbekannt Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe, Sygnatura: 2-14259a
- Biography
