Refugee Sculptor

Before magazine-cover girls became Nazi Germany's art ideal, one of the most widely heiled of German sculptors was a bushy-headed, Hitler-mustached Jew named Benno Elkan. For his portrait busts, a who's who of pre-Hitler Germany, he was paid as much as $5,000 a commission. A master of monumental stonecutting, who could make his granite flow like molten lava, glow like human flesh, Elkan was picked by the Government to carve its biggest monuments to Germany's World War I dead. Art-loving Germans trooped for miles to view the massive, grief-weighted, maternal figures he set up in the public squares of Frankfurt, Saarbrucken and Wickrath along the French frontier.

In 1933, with Adolf Hitler eying the Chancellorship, Benno Elkan correctly guessed that Germany would soon be an unhealthy place for him. He packed his trunks and a few of his more portable sculptures and fled across the Swiss border. One thing he took with him was a huge (6 ft. high, 7 ft. wide), bronze candelabrum, bristling with Biblical figures. Nazi authorities proclaimed him a degenerate artist whose real Jewish name was L. Kahn, set about systematically confiscating and destroying all of his statues they could lay hammers on.

Sixty-three-year-old Elkan finally settled in a modest red brick house in London, went on with his sculpture. Commissions were few and small. But little by little, he won British critical acclaim.

His portrait busts of Prince Edward, John D. Rockefeller and the abdicated King of Siam (who posed for him a full week) caused town talk. But of all his exhibited pieces, the one that attracted most attention was the gaunt candelabrum he had taken with him out of Germany. Last week British art-lovers bought it for a niche in Westminster Abbey. Said gratified Sculptor Elkan: "This is my greatest honor."

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