Vatican Museums

The two guiding forces in the work of Fritz Wotruba are a constant interest in the human figure and the strong architectural value of his sculptural creations. The Thinker of 1948 summarises both these aspects and represents one of the most complete examples of the stylistic transformation in his production that took place in 1946, when, following the Second World War, the artist returned to Vienna from his exile in Switzerland and became director of the city’s Academy of Fine Arts. Initially interested in engraving, in the mid-Forties Wotruba passed from a more classic approach, attentive to anatomy, to a structural concept of the human figure, seen as a composition of juxtaposed blocks, roughly sketched into the stone. Der Denker was subject to this process of geometric decomposition and re-composition, and represents an important milestone in his research that led him to conceive of the human figure as a work of architecture.