Gerhard Marcks
1889-1981
At the beginning of Gerhard Marcks' artistic career, he focused on drawing. As a teenager, he spent a lot of time in the zoological garden in Berlin and was intensively occupied with animal studies. He began sculpting autodidactically and with the support of Richard Scheibe, who he had met through Gropius. Scheibe let him work in his studio. It was Gropius who later made him head of the ceramic studio at the Bauhaus. From there, his path led him to the Burg Giebichenstein art school. He was fired in 1933 for political reasons and taught again from 1946-1950 (at the Landeskunsthochschule in Hamburg), but then decided to become a freelance sculptor.
Marck's work always remained representational and is strongly influenced by his veneration for Greek sculpture. At the same time, his love of animals remained an important theme. Perhaps his best-known work as an animalist is the statue of the Bremen Town Musicians in front of Bremen Town Hall from 1953. The artist's dictum: "I have conspired with the world as it stands before my eyes".
