Wilhelm Lehmbruck made his avant-garde breakthrough in 1911 with Kneeling Girl, an over-life-size figure whose expressive melancholy and elongated proportions established the artist’s reputation as an important German Expressionist sculptor. In Bust of Kneeling Girl, he isolated the sculpture’s most poignant passage—the pensive gesture of the tilted head—by provocatively cropping the figure at the midpoint of the breasts. Contemporary critics compared Kneeling Girl and Bust of Kneeling Girl to Gothic sculpture, at the time understood to communicate emotional and spiritual truth more directly than classical academic art. Lehmbruck debuted both sculptures at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, but they achieved their greatest impact in Germany, where the artist returned in 1914 after four years in France.