Art, literature & history
Hope and Despair II
1931
- Dating
- Exact year
- Held at
- The Cleveland Museum of Art
- Medium
- lithograph
- Collection no.
- 1953.344
- Attribution
- By the artist
- Image rights
- CC0 1.0License details
Ernst Barlach. Hope and Despair II. Ernst Barlach; The Cleveland Museum of Art; Gift of The Print Club of Cleveland in memory of William J. Eastman. CC0 1.0 (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/). Full-frame proportional resize and JPEG compression.
Collection: The Cleveland Museum of Art
About this artwork
Hope and Despair II — Ernst Barlach. 1931.
Medium: lithograph. Dimensions: .
Collection record: The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland. Museum connection according to this source; current display unverified.
In both his sculpture and prints, Barlach expressed the suffering and anguish of World War I (1914-18) and the difficult years that followed. The artist, whose work depicts ordinary workers, wrote: "Truly, not beauty and loveliness is our strength, our power, but rather the opposite, ugliness, daemonic passion and the grotesque genius of greatness..."
Source: official collection record. Metadata selected and normalized by Artline from the source export, accessed 10 September 2026; no museum endorsement. Reproduction rights are separate.
Location checked Sep 10, 2026. This does not indicate whether the work is on display.