Composition

Otto Freundlich built the plaster for this sculpture in his Paris studio in 1933, the year the Nazis took power in Germany. He was a German Jewish artist long settled in France, and he made the piece at monumental scale, a stack of rounded blocks leaning on one another. It stayed in the studio as plaster. Ten years later Freundlich was arrested, deported, and murdered in occupied Poland, at Majdanek or at Sobibor. He never saw it in bronze.

After the war his companion, the artist Jeanne Kosnick-Kloss, and a circle of supporters set out to have it cast. This bronze was made in Paris in 1961 and sent to the Netherlands, and the Kröller-Müller bought it that same year, as its new sculpture garden opened. The whole surface is covered in small flattened daubs that look like weathered sedimentary rock, and the bronze repeats each one of them from the original plaster.