Gerhard Marck, Reclining Nude, Pencil Drawing for sale at Pamono

Description

Gerhard Marcks

Berlin 1889 – 1981 Burgbrohl

Reclining nude

Pencil drawing, signed

Sheet size: 25 x 45 cm

Representation: approx. 20 x 37 cm

Frame: 38 x 54 cm

Good condition

Authenticity is guaranteed in writing.

The Berlin merchant’s son Gerhard Marcks, born in 1889, is considered, alongside Barlach, Lehmbruck and Kolbe, to be the most important German sculptor of the last century.

As a young man, whose brother had inspired him to work as an artist, Gerhard Marcks began studying animals in the Berlin Zoological Garden, which he soon turned into his first sculptures. In addition to the studio community with Richard Scheibe, which Gerhard Marcks joined in 1907, his development was also stimulated by the oeuvre of the animal sculptor August Gaul and his acquaintances with Georg Kolbe and Walter Gropius.
After the drastic experience of the First World War, Gerhard Marcks was appointed by Bruno Paul to the State School of Arts and Crafts in Berlin, and a year later he moved to the Bauhaus in Weimar, where he headed the Dornburg pottery workshop. In the first half of the 1920s, which coincides with his time at the Bauhaus, his oeuvre shows a clear expressionist influence, which is expressed in the geometrically conceived Dornburg pottery objects as well as in the slightly abstracted sculptural works. The three-dimensional works have been supplemented by woodcuts since the Weimar years, inspired by Lyonel Feininger, who headed the printing workshops at the Bauhaus until 1925. Clearly and purely composed, in a reduced formal language, Gerhard Marcks created numerous printing blocks throughout his life; Since the 1970s he has increasingly turned to lithography, which is easier to use.
After the dissolution of the Weimar Bauhaus, Gerhard Marcks moved to the arts and crafts school at Burg Giebichenstein in Halle as a professor in 1925. Travels took Gerhard Marcks to Greece and Italy and facilitated his artistic separation from Expressionism and the development of his characteristic personal style, which is entirely dedicated to the figure and captures it in a powerfully reduced formal language and a sensual, archaic-austere naturalness (for example the life-sized “Thuringian Venus “, 1930). Bronze became Gerhard Marck’s preferred material and the medium for his most important works.
The National Socialist dictatorship was a difficult time for Gerhard Marcks, as it was for most artists. In 1933 Gerhard Marcks was dismissed as a professor and then worked alternately in Berlin and Niehagen near Wustrow in Mecklenburg. A year after Hitler came to power, a scholarship took Gerhard Marcks to Rome while the pressure in Germany increasingly increased. In 1937, his works were ridiculed at the Degenerate Art exhibition, 24 of his works were confiscated in the Berlin Buchholz Gallery in the same year, and there was always the threat of a work ban. A bomb attack also destroyed Gerhard Marcks’ Berlin studio and part of his oeuvre in 1943; two years later, 17 boxes of his works that were stored in Halle were lost during the war. The sculptural work of those years shows a tendency towards dreamy withdrawal and internalization, which after 1945 – Marcks was initially a professor at the Hamburg Art School and from 1950 a freelance sculptor in Cologne – turned into powerful tragedy.
One of Gerhard Marck’s most important post-war projects is the creative, expressive and emphatically time-critical continuation of the niche figures “Community of Saints” begun by Barlach at St. Catherine’s Church in Lbeck (1946-1948). Numerous memorials were also created in monumental formats (such as the “Charonsnachen”, 1951, Hamburg-Ohlsdorf cemetery), and traditional subjects also reflect the mentality of the early post-war years (such as “Bound Prometheus II”, 1948). In contrast, the sculptor’s best-known work, the “Bremen Town Musicians” from 1951, exudes a fresh cheerfulness. In the following years, Gerhard Marck’s attention to antique materials, which had already become apparent, became apparent, and he also made significant contributions to the art of plastic portraiture. Gerhard Marcks died in 1981 at the age of 92; his extensive estate is kept in the Gerhard Marcks House in Bremen.