Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 20:31, 3 August 2015

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in German. (May 2014) Click for important translation instructions. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Misplaced Pages. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 2,148 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing German Misplaced Pages article at ]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|de|Josef Thorak}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Misplaced Pages:Translation.

Josef Thorak (7 February 1889 in Salzburg, Austria – 26 February 1952 in Hartmannsberg, Bavaria) was an Austrian-German sculptor. He was well known for his "grandiose monuments".

Life and career

Thorak's reputation was established in 1922 when he created Der sterbende Krieger (The Dying Warrior), a statue memorializing the dead of World War I in Stolpmünde.

In 1933, Thorak joined Arno Breker as one of the two "official sculptors" of the Third Reich. In his government-approved studio outside Munich, Thorak worked on statues intended to represent the folk-life of Germany under Nazi leadership; these works tended to be heroic in scale, up to 65 feet (20 meters) in height. His official works from this period included a number of sculptures at the Berlin Olympic Stadium of 1936.

Albert Speer referred to Thorak as "more or less my sculptor, who frequently designed statues and reliefs for my buildings" and "who created the group of figures for the German pavilion at the Paris World's Fair. His statue Comradeship stood outside the pavilion, depicting two enormous nude males, clasping hands and standing defiantly side by side, in a pose of racial camaraderie.

Because of his preference for muscular neo-classical nude sculpture, Thorak was known among some as "Professor Thorax". Some expressionist influences can be noticed in his generally neoclassical style.

Reich Chancellery's striding horses

On 20 May 2015, two of Thorak's sculptures, a pair of colossal "striding horses" that had once stood outside the Reich Chancellery built by Albert Speer in Berlin, turned up during a police raid on a storehouse in Bad Dürkheim, along with other Nazi art. The horses had disappeared in 1989 from a barracks ground in Eberswalde northeast of Berlin, where they had sat since sometime after the Second World War.

See also

• Nazi architecture

References

1. Rhodes, Anthony, ‘’Propaganda: The Art of Persuasion: World War II’’ Chelsea House Publishers, New York, 1976 , p. 28
2. "Art: Bigger Than Life"
3. Speer, Albert, Spandau: the Secret Diaries’’, Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. New York, 1976, p. 261
4. Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, p260 ISBN 0-393-02030-4
5. "Verschollene Nazi-Kunst entdeckt" Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 20 May 2015 — Article about Nazi art found in police raid in Bad Dürkheim

External links

Media related to Josef Thorak at Wikimedia Commons

Template:Persondata

This article about an Austrian sculptor is a stub. You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it.

• v
• t
• e

This article about a German artist is a stub. You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it.

• v
• t
• e

• 1889 births
• 1952 deaths
• People from Salzburg
• Austrian sculptors
• German sculptors
• Nazi architecture
• 20th-century sculptors
• Austrian artist stubs
• European sculptor stubs
• German artist stubs