Adolf von Hildebrand

Hildebrand, Adolf von 

Born Oct. 6, 1847, in Marburg, Hesse; died Jan. 18, 1921, in Munich. German sculptor and art theorist.

Hildebrand attended art school in Nürnberg (1864–66) and in Munich (1866–67). He moved to Italy in 1867 and later settled in Germany. His aesthetic theory, which developed through his association with H. von Marées and C. Fiedler, in many ways determined the major characteristics of his sculpture—an inner reticence, a slight coldness of image, plastic clarity, compactness and static quality of form, laconicism, and architectonic preciseness of composition. Examples of his works are Adam (1878, marble, Museum of Fine Arts, Leipzig) and Youth (1884, marble, National Gallery, Berlin). Hildebrand’s idealism, which absolutized in art the primary laws of interaction between form and space, was developed in German art criticism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries by H. Wölfflin and A. Riegl.

WORKS

Gesammelte Schriften zur Kunst: Hrsg. von H. Bock. Cologne-Opladen, 1969.
In Russian translation:
Problema formy v izobrazitel’nom iskusstve. Moscow, 1914.

REFERENCES

Hausenstein, W. Adolf von Hildebrand. Munich, 1947.
Faensen, H. Die bildnerische Form: Die Kunstauffassungen Konrad Fiedlers, Adolf von Hildenbrands und Hans von Marées. Berlin, 1965.