Artist: Heinrich Semke
Date: 1933
Size: 48 x 22 cm
Museum: National Museum of Contemporary Art - Museu do Chiado (Lisboa, Portugal)
Technique: Terracotta
The portrait was one of the genres chosen by Semke to proceed with the renewal of sculptural practice which, in the Portuguese context, remained largely anchored in international references of the late nineteenth century. The formal and compositional simplification will be the path chosen, and an example of it is the portrait of Ruth Osenberg, wife of Paul Osenberg, a German couple living in Cascais with whom the artist had a strong friendship when he arrived in Lisbon. The face is summarily shaped, abstracting details and volumes, in search of essential traits that not only identify the model but pretend to be a mirror of the complex psychology that supports it. Hence the deliberate coldness and the concentrated expression that the synthetic modeling, a certain planning, the hieratic mouth or the excavated eyes favor. Hence also the scheme of composition adopted, repeated in other works of this stage, in which the head, cut at the base of the long neck, rests at the end of an irregular socle, protruding and thus showing itself at the limit of equilibrium. Instability that symbolizes the complexity of feelings that quarrel in most people’s innermost. The soft velatura of greys and browns brings in a certain tenderness, but does not eradicate the coldness that animates it, in a contradictory game, allied to the warmth of the molding mark that the clay carries. Game that gains in possibilities in one of the other two existing versions of this piece, made in white clay glazed in a rich opposition between white and glazed manganese.
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