Jüngling

Ernesto de Fiori’s »Youth« was a sensation at the 1912 exhibition of the Cologne Sonderbund, making the Austrian, who was born in Rome in 1884, famous overnight. The elongated and delicate figure, which thanks to its expressive gesture quickly acquired the nickname »The Sufferer,« marked a bold departure from naturalistic sculpture. Entirely in the tradition of Jugendstil and Symbolism, de Fiori intensified the expressiveness of his figure, emphasizing the emotional to such an extent that some critics even spoke of an exaggerated pathos.

Produced in Paris, »Youth« is one of the artist’s earliest sculptures. Like his contemporary Wilhelm Lehmbruck (1881–1919), de Fiori remained faithful to the human figure throughout his life and was vehemently opposed to abstraction. His male and female nudes from the 1910s and 1920s, with their modern formal language, made an important contribution to the development of figurative sculpture in the early 20th century. In his later works, de Fiori reduced the intense emotionality of the »Youth« to a cooler basic tone.