Büste Justine. Um 1923.
terracotta. Dark grey earthenware with brown oxid engobe.
Rudloff 108 e. 20,5 x 22,5 x 11,5 cm ( 8 x 8,8 x 4,5 in).
The bust was recorded in Marcks's work diaries - sorted by seperate materials (in this case terracotta) under no. 9.

PROVENANCE: Private collection USA.

Gerhard Marcks was born in Berlin on 18 February 1889. He moved into a joined studio with the sculptor Richard Scheibe after graduating from scholl in 1908. His artistic work was interrupted by military service in 1912 in Lübeck and the war. Bruno Paul offered the artist a teaching post at the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule in Berlin in 1918. Marcks accepted the offer but joined Walter Gropius at the Staatliches Bauhuas in Weimar one year later. He was made responsible for the Bauhaus pottery in Donburg/Saale in 1920

Although the classical body language was still dominant in Marcks's early work, it has been reduced in this one to an abstract formal body language that cedes priority to intensified expression. Models that cannot be ignored are both Late Archaic Greek sculpture and Etruscan art. Although small, the bust conveys a directness of statement with Archaic-abstract completeness, which, in the clarity of the formal language eschews all illusionist interpretation. Marcks has formulated a type rather than an individual.

In 1925 Paul Thiersch appointed Marcks to teach the sculpture class at the Kunstgewerbeschule Burg Giebichenstein/Halle on the Saale. During this period Marcks went on several trips to Italy and Paris. In 1928 he was awarded the Villa-Romana-prize. At the end of the war Marcks taught at the Landeskunstschule in Hamburg. He moved to Cologne-Müngersdor in 1950 where he built up a studio and worked as an independent artist. Numerous travels during the 1960s and 1970s took the artist to the USA and to Mexico, South Africa, Italy and Greece. Gerhard Marcks died in Cologne in 1981. [KD]