International studio (27.1905/1906(1906))

Shidio-Talk


MODEL FOR EXECUTION IN WROUGHT IRON
BY OTTO RICHTER
under official influence, an opposite tendency
had prevailed. The latest of these artists,
a product so to speak of the school of sculp-
ture arising from the Reichstag building, is
Otto Richter, a native of Saxony, and a
self-made man in the best sense of the word.
In the period from 1890-95 he set up in a
Studio of his own, whence he sent out a
considerable number of monumental decora-
tive works, for the most part in the florid
renaissance taste of Wallot, and designed for
public buildings or banks. Subsequently
Richter drifted into the barocco, following
the lead of the latest architecture in vogue in
'Germany. His most recent efforts are seen
in statues, friezes, and bas-reliefs for such
buildings as the Prussian Senate House, the
Offices of the various State Ministers, the
new Museum of Applied Art (.Kunstgewerbe),
and the Courts of Justice, designed by the “evening”


clever architect, Professor O. Schmalz, of Berlin. Richter
has also made designs of fanciful conventionality for
bronze and other metal Castings. In process of time a
love of ideal subjects has developed in Richter’s mind.
In 1901 he gained the first prize in a competition for
the Memorial Monument to the Emperor Frederick,
at Charlottenburg, and the same year saw the produc-
tion of his best work, In Tormenty a figure of a youth
chained and lying prone, but writhing from the bite of
a snake : in this the frenzy of physical pain is expressed
in a form of living and supreme beauty. Of his other
recent works we may name a marble relief for a chimney-
front of the Sleeping Beauty in a tangle of wrought-iron
rose branches • a Statuette called Forget-me-not, in which

BY OTTO RICHTER
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