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Will Lammert (5 January 1892 – 30 October 1957) was a Germansculptor. In 1959 he was posthumously awarded theNational Prize of the German Democratic Republic.[1]
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Will Lammert was born in Hagen in 1892, the son of amachinist. He completed an apprenticeship asstucco,stone andwood sculptor[1] and initially worked in the studios of the Russian sculptorMoissey Kogan. From 1911 he studied underRichard Luksch at the stateKunstgewerbeschule (school of applied arts) inHamburg with a scholarship received on the recommendation of the art collector and founder of theFolkwang Museum,Karl Ernst Osthaus. Between 1913 and 1914 he spent time studying inParis.[1] There he was introduced by his former teacher Moissey Kogan to the sculptorsAlexander Archipenko andOtto Freundlich.
In 1915 he served as a soldier in theFirst World War, during which he was seriously wounded. After the war he attended the College of Ceramics in Höhr, nearKoblenz. In the years which followed he worked as a freelance sculptor in the town of his birth, as well as inDüsseldorf[1] andMunich. He also exhibited works in conjunction with the groupDas Junge Rheinland, whose members includedOtto Dix andMax Ernst. In 1920 he married Hette Meyerbach.
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He moved toEssen in 1922[1][2], at the same time as the Folkwang Museum. In Essen, the state sponsored the foundation of the Margarethenhöhe artists colony[1][2], where he occupied a studio. He created free-standing and architectural sculptures for buildings designed by the architects Edmund Körner, Georg Metzendorf andAlfred Fischer.[2] Along with his work as an artist he also ran a ceramics workshop.[2] BothHermann Blumenthal andFritz Cremer began their artistic careers in his studio. In 1931, on the express recommendation ofMax Liebermann, he received a scholarship from thePrussian Academy of Arts to study inRome, and spent nine months at theVilla Massimo, working alongside the artistsWerner Gilles,Ernst Wilhelm Nay andHermann Blumenthal. In 1932 he joined theKPD, the German Communist Party.[1][2]
After the Nazis seized power Lammert was sought by theGestapo on charges of high treason. In the early summer of 1933 he was forced to emigrate via the Netherlands to Paris[1][3], his Jewish wife Hette and their two sons Till and Ule following on.[2] For periods he lived in the same building as the German writerBodo Uhse and publisherWilli Münzenberg. However, in 1934 Lammert was expelled from France and forced to flee again, this time to the Soviet Union.[1][3] Meanwhile, in Essen the press was stirring up hatred against the "Bolshevist artist with his close Jewish relations" and his "degenerate art". In the years which followed, almost all his works in Germany were destroyed by the Nazis.[2]
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Despite Lammert's greatest endeavours to find work as a sculptor, efforts which led him all the way toSiberia, there were few opportunities in theSoviet Union for him to practise his art. In 1938 he moved out of Moscow and into the suburb ofPeredelkino, where was able to stay inFriedrich Wolf's dacha.[1] He kept in close contact with other German emigres too, such asJohannes R. Becher,Adam Scharrer andErich Weinert. He worked in various architect's offices and ran drawing groups together with another exiled artist, the painterHeinrich Vogeler. After the attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 he was expelled from the greater Moscow region, this time for being German, and arrived first of all in theTatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, where he worked at a "kolkhoz" collective farm. A year later he was conscripted into theLabour Army and brought toKazan.[1][3] His exile did not end with the war, however, but was merely converted into a "Special Exile in Perpetuity."
Lammert was only allowed to leave the Soviet Union in December 1951, finally able to return to Germany – to the thenEast Germany.[1][2][3] Prior to this, other returnees, such as Else and Friedrich Wolf, had repeatedly called for him to be given an exit permit. One year later he was elected a full member of theGerman Academy of the Arts. He died in October 1957 in Berlin, still working on the pieces for theRavensbrück concentration camp memorial site he had begun in 1954.[3] Lammert was laid to rest in the Pankow III Cemetery in theNiederschönhausen district of Berlin where he had his studio. The National Prize of the German Democratic Republic was awarded to him posthumously in 1959. His wife used the money to set up theWill Lammert Prize, which was awarded by the German Academy of the Arts to numerous young sculptors between the years of 1962 to 1992.[1]
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At the age of twenty-two Lammert was already getting attention at the CologneWerkbund exhibition. Two of his golden figures were removed from the exhibition as being morally offensive. All that remains of them today is a fragment ofKopf einer goldenen Figur (Head of a Golden Figure) from 1914. The other,Kleine Sitzende I (Small Girl Sitting I), had been created prior to that, in 1913. After the First World War he was represented by the gallery ownerAlfred Flechtheim, and participated in various exhibitions held by the group Das Junge Rheinland. He created portraits, large standing and reclining female figures and a variety of small-scale sculptures. At the same time he was taking public commissions, including for exampleMutter Erde (Mother Earth) in 1926, for the entrance to the South-West Cemetery in Essen, and a memorial to the war dead inMarburg in the form of a lion (1926/27). He returned from his study visit inItaly withWeiblichen und männlichen Akt (Female and Male Figures) from 1932/33. After 1933, Lammert's early work was destroyed almost in its entirety in the run-up to the "Degenerate Art" campaign, on the instigation of its protagonist,Klaus Graf von Baudissin. This part of his output is known to us today primarily through the photographs ofAlbert Renger-Patzsch and Edgar Jené. Together with some few small sculptures, only theKleine Liegende (Small Reclining Girl) of 1930, a fragment ofRuth Tobi (1919) and an early version ofKarl Ernst Osthaus (1930) remain. Casts of these sculptures can be found today in some museums, including the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, and in the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago. We also have a series of drawings, made predominately during his study visits to France (1912/13) and Italy (1932).
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Lammert could only take up his art again after his return from eighteen years of exile. During this period he produced some portrait and memorial sculptures, including figures ofKarl Marx (1953),Eduard von Winterstein (1954),Friedrich Wolf (1954),Wilhelm Pieck (1955), andThomas Müntzer (1956), but in the main he dedicated himself to his composition of the memorial site at the formerRavensbrück concentration camp. After his death, some of Lammert's design was realised. TheTragende (Woman with Burden) from 1957 was enlarged and exhibited on a plinth in 1959. Thirteen sculptures originally intended for the foot of the stele have stood in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Berlin Mitte since 1985 to commemorate the Jewish victims of fascism. This group of figures (arrangement byMark Lammert) was the first memorial in Berlin to the Jewish victims of the Nazis. A bust of Karl Marx, which was on display in the entrance to Berlin'sHumboldt University, was removed at the time ofGerman reunification.
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