Stimulation

Gerhard Marcks is Germany's best-known, and perhaps its unluckiest living sculptor. By last week some 4,000 visitors had trooped through an exhibition in Hamburg celebrating Marcks's 60th birthday, and thousands more would see the show on its coming tour of other western German cities. His lean but otherwise classical collection of bronze and ceramic figures, done with clean, quiet simplicity, drew nothing but raves from the critics. It was a far cry from the mid-'30s, when his sculptures, seized by the state, toured Germany as warning examples of what Adolf Hitler considered "degenerate" art.

But the retrospective show contained a pitifully small sampling of Marcks's early work. The Nazis had melted some of it down for shell-case metal. More had been destroyed when an Allied bomb wiped out his Berlin studio in 1944, and still more when Russian troops arrived in the Mecklenburg town where he had begun some, new work. The Russians smashed the new work, as if Marcks had been Hitler's pampered pet.

A hit of the show was Marcks's Holy Spring, a naked, hopeful-looking boy modeled in memory of his son, who was killed at the front. The spirit that enabled him to make that one had stood him in good stead throughout the years of Nazi domination and war.

Marcks spends his mornings sculpting in gypsum, which he likes better than clay because "it is so ugly--its brutal white color shows up the weaknesses." In the afternoons he goes home to the two-room apartment he shares with his wife, and rests. In the evenings he does playfully bizarre woodcuts which sell very well, help to finance the casting of more & more of his hard-to-sell gypsum figures in bronze.

A shy, spry man with a Germanic love of theory, Marcks makes no bones about what he thinks art should be. "It must be stimulating," he says. "I reject any art that simply amuses. Stimulation, as I interpret it, means leading men to the eternal laws, away from what is common, usual and mean."

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