The focus of the Von der Heydt Museum sculpture collection lies in European 19th- and 20th-century work. This room presents a representative selection of central pieces to correspond with the paintings.
In the foreground is the portrayal of the human body, where there is a gradual development to abstract form. Bernhard Afinger’s Penelope, wife of the Greek king Odysseus, is worked in rich detail. Every fold of the robe, every hair, even the pupils of her eyes are carved into the marble. Aristide Maillol, in contrast, largely dispenses with details and individual characteristics in favour of calm form and surface and coherent volume in his bronze Eve with the Apple. The French sculptor Auguste Rodin set new sculptural standards as an important precursor of modernism. In his Striding Man, from 1900, he takes up one of the oldest artistic problems, the portrayal of movement. Hans Arp’s works recall organic forms such as human bodies, plants or animal, but they are highly stylised and simplified. Human Concretion is the title of a plaster sculpture made in 1933, in which a human figure can only be conjectured.
