SecondIn 1957, a bronze statue of the goddess Pallas Athene stood in front of the Wilhelm-Dörpfeld-Gymnasium in Wuppertal. It comes from Arno Breker, the main sculptor of the “Third Reich”. However, this goddess was not as muscular as the swollen youth favored by Booker to win Hitler’s favor. She stretched out her spear arms in the air, as slender as Giacometti, with a girlish chest and ancient features. In 2003, when she was thrown from the pedestal by a stranger, she lost her shield and sword; she was left with a copper spear and a warrior helmet. Dörpfeld-Gymnasium keeps a distance from Breker’s work through a plaque attached to the base. Nevertheless, the school meeting decided to demolish the statue three years ago. The protection of local monuments is horizontal. In a round of mediation in January 2020, the two parties in the dispute agreed to supplement Blake’s bronzes with contemporary works of art. The bidding is still in progress.
Since last week, the Wuppertal Palace Hotel is temporarily German History Museum Live in Berlin. In the early 1950s, Blake’s brother Hans had a Marx head in the showcase designed for the University of Jena. Since 1949, Hans Breker has taught at the Weimar Academy of Arts in East Germany under the pseudonym van Breek. After resettling in the Federal Republic of Germany, he received many public commissions, including monuments to the victims of the Second World War in Wesel and Leverkusen, as well as Kaiser Korwitz and Dietrich Bon Bust of Hofer. In 1958, he designed a memorial to the deaths of German assault guns in Karlstadt, Franken.
Can’t talk about the continuity of style
Both Arno and Hans Breker are on the “Gottbegnadeten list” with more than a thousand names. The National Socialist regime of December 1944 brought together the most important writers, actors, directors, architects and visual artists of the “Third Reich”. . They were all discharged from military service.
The space constellation in DHM reveals the conceptual difficulties of the exhibition, which aims to trace the development route of Nazi art after zero hour. During the Cold War, the Blake brothers adapted to the expectations of their clients, from the ascetic classicism of Pallas statues to the original monumentality of Marx portraits and sacrificial monuments. This elder of the real brown country artist continued to prosper in his business until his death, leading artists and intellectuals, but Federal Chancellor Adenauer and Erhard also asked him to cast them into bronze. Therefore, apart from the hostility to abstraction, there is hardly any question of style continuity, even Richard Shebe, who designed the Germanic hero for the victims of July 20 in the Bundler neighborhood of Berlin in 1953, but with With his update of the Ebert Memorial on the facade of St. Paul’s Church in Frankfurt, the official language of the 1920s has been restored. But how do you prove this: a continuum of interruptions?
