Child portrait

Josef Hoeffler initially learned in an artistic woodcarving workshop. A trip to Paris enabled him to confront the masterpieces of applied art at the Palace of Versailles, especially the work of Auguste Rodin. Contact with the works of this sculptor led Hoeffler to further his education at the Royal Regional School of Building Crafts in his hometown of Kaiserslautern. He attended this school for just one year before matriculating for two semesters with Wilhelm von Rümann at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. In 1905 the artist made his debut at Palatyńskiej Wystawy Rzemiosła i Przemysłu [The Palatinate Exhibition of Craft and Industry], after which he moved to Hamburg. He supported himself through carving commissions, devoting only his free evenings and Sundays to art. In 1907, during the Munich Secession exhibition, Hoeffler showed a plaster figure of a naked, crouching boy as well as a wooden boy's head and Portret młodego mężczyzny [The Portrait of a Young Man]. The latter work opened the artist's doors to important state and private collections. Carved from linden wood, the physiognomy - with its drawn features, well-defined mouth, empty eye sockets, large ears and bald skull, set on a long, slender neck - reminded contemporaries of ancient Egyptian sculpture, portraits of Japanese monks or Donatello's statues for the campanile of Florence Cathedral. The Art Nouveau fluidity of the lines and the light colours of the raw material contrasted with the stereometry of the pedestal covered in glossy black lacquer. In 1909, Hoeffler made a portrait of his son, who was a few years old and is now in the Szczecin collection. Despite today's obvious connection with the stylistics and decadent, self-reflexive themes of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, these works, made without preparatory sketches, were praised for their independence from all fashions and fidelity to nature, as well as monumentalism achieved only by means of modelling. The majority of the sculptures were in fact small in size.

Szymon Piotr Kubiak