Seated Youth

• Size: 103.2 x 76.2 x 115.5 cm (40 5/8 x 30 x 45 1/2 in.)

Seated Youth, subtitled "The Friend," portrays both survivor and mourner, one who questions his own existence while he meditates on and grieves over the loss of friends. It was Lehmbruck's final testament as a sculptor. In the postwar period, when all of Europe was in need of new cemeteries to bury the dead, the Kaiserberg War Cemetery in Duisburg, Germany (the city of Lehmbruck's birth), chose Seated Youth as its cemetery monument. In January 1919, Lehmbruck was selected as a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin. Unable to recover from the trauma of the war years, however, and suffering from periods of deep depression, he committed suicide in March of that same year.

national gallery of Art