T. Blasche. Art Nouveau sculpture, ca. 1900

T. BLASCHE. Art Nouveau sculpture, ca. 1900.
"Ruth".
Polychrome terracotta.
Signed on one side and marks on the back.
Size: 68 x 40 x 20 cm .
Terracotta bust from the Art Nouveau period, representing a beautiful peasant woman named Ruth with long and thick hair, decorated with flowers. Wheat ears and sickle on the front. Hand-polychromed in various colours, signed on one side and with marks on the back.
In Art Nouveau, influenced by Symbolist literature, women are considered to be beings of transformation and metamorphosis, and for this reason they are often depicted with extreme fantasy, being associated with the supernatural and the unknown. The feminine is intimately associated with the hidden part of nature, with the mysterious and therefore attractive and seductive. The fragile woman, with narrow shoulders and a stylised figure, like a nymph or sylph, lures men inexorably towards perdition. She is thus conceived as a contradictory figure, exotic and weak in appearance but demonic in essence. Here, however, the woman does not look directly at the viewer, luring the man to his destruction with her irresistible gaze. On the contrary, she is lost in her own thoughts, unaware of our gaze and therefore unreachable, as if she belonged to another world, the world of the mysterious, the world of dreams, the dark side of nature. She is therefore the personification of an ideal, but she is at the same time a fully corporeal figure, magnificently modelled in her anatomy and movements, endowed with great elegance and gracefulness, and also possessing a marked personality.