Art: Bigger Than Life

In Adolf Hitler’s Germany, Sculptor Josef Thorak had a big job: official sculptor of the Third Reich. His huge statuary was to decorate the squares and public buildings of the city that Hitler was to make the “thousand-year capital” of the Reich. To house Thorak’s enormous work in preparation, some of it six stories high and weighing 1,000 tons, the Führer built him a studio as high and wide as a Zeppelin hangar. When the job proved to be insecure, Sculptor Thorak retired to semiobscurity in Bavaria.

Last week, 61, and finally cleared by a Bavarian denazification court, Thorak was allowed to make a modest comeback with a postwar show in Salzburg. His most ambitious works, along with the regime they celebrated, had long since been destroyed, e.g., his huge (60 by 36 ft.) marble statue of German road builders, the product of four years’ work, had been cut into building blocks. Nonetheless, Thorak had managed to get together 17 pieces of his work including His Last Flight, a limply classical war memorial, to remind Salzburg of just how grandiose he could be.

Towering twice as big as life were melodramatic figures of Copernicus, Paracelsus, the 16th Century alchemist-physician, and Fischer von Erlach, the Austrian baroque architect. One full-blown nude stood nearly seven yards tall in her bare feet. But with his biggest booster gone, Thorak found his reputation had already shrunk to less than life size. The public sniffed at his glibly traditional sculpture, complained that his 12-foot Paracelsus (1940), intended for the local railway plaza, was not worthy of Salzburg.

The experts were no kinder. One critic suggested that Thorak’s jumbo-sized statues would have been more appropriate as small porcelain figurines to “decorate a small table.” Said another: “It shows how low our taste has become, that this ‘art’ of the dictatorship still finds acknowledgment today.”

Sitting among his stone giants last week, Josef Thorak was asked what he thought of his old patron’s taste in art. “He understood me,” said Thorak finally, “and if what I do is art, he understood art.”