Sculptor, born in Berlin, Germany. In 1937 he emigrated to Istanbul, but returned to Germany in 1966. His early Dreiklang (1919) and later works after 1949 are chiefly abstract in form.
Rudolf Belling (1886 - 1972) was a German sculptor.
Artistic theories
At the very beginning of the 20th century Rudolf Belling’s name was something like a battlecry.
Rudolf Belling amplified: a sculpture should show only good views. And so he became an opponent to one of the German head scientists of art in Berlin, Adolf von Hildebrandt, who, in his book, “The problem of Form in Sculpture” (1903) said: Sculpture should be comprehensible – and should never force the observer to go round it. Rudolf Belling disproved the current theories with his works.
His theories of space and form convinced even critics like Carl Einstein and Paul Westheim, and influenced generations of sculptors after him.
Departure from Germany
From 1933 on, Belling had no chance to work in his home country. The President of the Academy of Arts in Berlin advised him in the name of the Minister of Education and Arts to hand in his resignation from the Academy.
In 1935 Rudolf Belling stayed for eight months in New York, where he had an exhibition in the Weyhe Gallery with his most important works from the Modern Classic Period.
He returned to Germany because his nine-year-old son Thomas was in danger there since his mother, Rudolf Belling’s first wife, had been Jewish.
From 1937 on he was professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, re-organizing the department of sculpture and mediating introductions towards modern art, basing his work on traditional studies.
From 1951 to 1966 he was professor at the Technical University in Istanbul, at the department of architecture. He was called back to the Academy in Berlin West only in 1956, the same year the works which stayed in New York could be received back with the help of the Foreign Office.
At the age of eighty he decided to return to Germany again, where he lived in Krailling, near Munich.
The archive is meanwhile managed by his daughter Elisabeth Weber-Belling.
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