The current exhibition at the Germanic Museum, one of the most important ever held at that institution, illustrates by excellent examples the most significant phases of post-war German sculpture.

The fact that much of modern sculpture can be multiplied through casting in bronze, terra cotta, and artificial stone gives it a far greater social significance than painting. It is, perhaps, for this reason that German sculpture (together with architecture) reached a peak of general excellence never attained by painting and scarcely reached even by sculptors of other countries.

Kolbe, Barlach, Lehmbruck are names as familiar to exhibition-goers as Maillol or Rodin. Lehmbruck, that strange, intense artist who committed suicide in 1919, is the creator of monumental figures, some calm and passive, others struggling against a malignant fate. Lehmbruck is essentially a worker in clay, a modeler, but with a rare sense of plastic form.

Kolbe, like Lehmbruck, never uses the hammer and chisel. Like Lehmbruck, too, his art suggests a man conscious of a world governed by illogical forces. He seeks escape in dreams of gentle adolescence. Youths and maidens take dim shape as though seen from a distance, or through a haze.

Barlach's reaction to his environment is vigorous and positive. Unlike the other two, he is essentially a carver and, like his late Gothic German predecessors, is a carver of wood. His peasant men and women are emotional creatures, strangely Slavic in character, clad in roughhewn garments that are subtly expressive of the figures' mood. They have the same subjective intensity that is found in the strange dramas written by the artist.