Art: Not Quite Greek

It is not the function of art to relieve those without faith from their boredom.

With that hard line, German Sculptor Gerhard Marcks dismisses most modern art. Marcks is a Lutheran in religion, a classicist in sculpture, and anything but bored. At 65 he is laboring mightily to produce the best sculptures of his career. Last week 36 of them were on view at the London Arts Council Gallery. Items:

¶ A slender girl sitting on the floor. Her eyes are shut, and she clasps one foot in her hand to make a gracefully dreaming closed circuit of her lithe young body.

¶ A youth sitting with bound wrists on one knee and violently downthrust head on the other. He gives an impression of immense vitality borne down by even greater, unseen weight.

¶ A kneeling cow, which conveys at once the strain of its unnatural position and the preferability of being human.

¶ A rather plain Venus in a gown, bending to teach her little boy how to nock an arrow. The playfulness of the piece in no way modifies its classic harmony.

What He Means. British critics—who find little to boggle at in the well-ventilated torsos of their own Henry Moore—seemed a bit baffled by Marcks’s quiet bronzes. The Manchester Guardian called him “a master of gesture,” but complained that “most of his large nudes, gesturing only in the restrained way becoming to gods and goddesses, lack that final subtlety of modeling which makes such statues live.” Retorted the New Statesman & Nation, “They are too subtle for the superficial glance. His achievement . . . is his remarkable patience . . . that allows him time to discover his subject’s undramatic drama.” Art News & Review noted that a “vein of somewhat folky humor persists [but] the greatest quality [is] deep calm, giving a sense of a pastoral order in mankind.”

A more powerful sculptor would probably not have excited such diverse reactions. Nor would one less powerful, since lesser men strive for the obvious, which Marcks scorns. His art. like that of the ancient Greeks, chiefly celebrates the wonder and joy of being alive, of being able to stand up and say, “I am I.”

Yet instead of the joyously dawning self-awareness of the Greeks. Marcks must share in the wearily analytical, self-deprecating consciousness of his time. His figures can be convincing in gesture, subtle in modeling, mildly dramatic, funny and reposeful, all together. But they run counter to the breast-beating spirit of the age without breaking free of it. They exhibit joy constrained, and have the stuff, not the spark, of greatness.

How He Lives. There is a kind of greatness in Marcks’s life. The Nazis hounded him. exhibited his work as “de generate,” then melted much of it down for armaments. During World War II, an Allied bomb destroyed his Berlin studio and all it contained. He started over again in Mecklenburg, but after a year the Russians arrived, broke into his new studio and smashed everything they, found. His eldest son was killed at the front. Through all this he never wavered in his reverence for life nor in his dedication to art.

Today Marcks lives in a small house on the outskirts of Cologne. White-haired, blue-eyed and erect, he rises each morning at six for a long tramp through the fields. He returns to spend six hours a day, six days a week in his studio. “Nowadays,” he says, “my body rebels at longer hours. Physically I’m declining, but artistically I’ve only recently arrived. Musicians mature first; sculptors last of all.”