Pandora

Pandora is a bronze sculpture Edwin Scharff made in 1951 and 1952, and it stands in the Edwin Scharff Museum in Neu-Ulm. The figure keeps its classical proportions, while a touch of modern abstraction breaks into the stylised forms.

Born there in 1887, Scharff trained in Munich and Paris, where Aristide Maillol and Auguste Rodin shaped his sense of form. Cubist elements slip into his figures beside that classical schooling, and they explain the stylisation you see in the bronze. Recognition came early: he won a bronze medal in the art competition at the 1928 Olympic Games. The Nazi regime then branded him a degenerate artist and destroyed many of his works. After the war he became a professor in Hamburg, and Pandora belongs to those years of rebuilding.

Two versions of the work are known: a monumental casting and a smaller, more closely detailed counterpart. The larger one measures 240 centimetres, while the smaller trades scale for finer detail. Both date from those same postwar years, when a sculptor the regime had tried to erase worked himself back into bronze.