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

Life and career

Thorak was born out of wedlock in Vienna. His father, also Josef Thorak, was from East Prussia; his mother was from Salzburg, where she returned soon after his birth and the couple married in 1896. That year he was placed in a religious boarding school for neglected children, but his schooling ended after he set fire to his bed in late 1898 and was injured by a nun disciplining him, which led to a dispute in the press and the courts. In 1903 he began an apprenticeship as a potter in Slovakia; after completion of this and of journeyman years in Austria and Germany, he started work at a factory in Vienna and took classes from the sculptor Anton Hanak. From 1911 to 1915 he studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts, interrupted by two periods of service in the First World War and a study trip to Bulgaria and Romania. Julius von Schlosser, Director of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, recommended him and he secured a studio under Ludwig Manzel at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin; he joined the Berlin Secession in 1917.

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 20 metres (65 feet) in height. His official works from this period included a number of sculptures at the Berlin Olympic Stadium of 1936. His work was also part of the sculpture event in the art competition at the 1932 Summer Olympics.

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 nicknamed "Professor Thorax". Some expressionist influences can be noticed in his generally neoclassical style.

After the Second World War, Thorak was pronounced legally denazified and permitted to hold a final exhibition in Salzburg in July 1950, which was poorly received. His Austrian citizenship was restored in 1951. In February 1952, he died at Schloss Hartmannsberg in Bavaria, which he had purchased in 1937.

Personal life

Thorak married three times. In 1918 he married Hertha Kroll; they had two sons, the older born before their marriage, in January 1917. The couple divorced in 1926 but continued to live together until her death in 1928. The following year he married Hilda Lubowski, with whom he had a third son, but after the Nazis came to power in 1933, the couple agreed to divorce because of her Jewish ancestry. She emigrated in 1939 to France and subsequently to England. In 1946, Thorak married Erna Hoenig, an American who had been living at Schloss Hartmannsberg since 1944; their son was born in 1949.

Reich Chancellery striding horses

Thorak sculpted three oversize horses (3 metres (9.8 ft) high) for the Nazi party rally grounds at Nuremberg. Two of these, which had been placed in 1939 outside the Reich Chancellery built by Albert Speer, were discovered along with other Nazi art in a police raid on a storehouse in Bad Dürkheim, Rhineland-Palatinate, in May 2015. The two horses had been removed in 1989 from a barracks ground in Eberswalde, northeast of Berlin, at the time in East Germany, where they had sat since sometime after the Second World War.

The third Thorak horse was displayed in the Haus der Deutschen Kunst in Munich as part of the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great German Art Exhibition) in 1939, then stood outside Thorak's studio. In August 2015, it was rediscovered on the grounds of a boarding school in Ising, Bavaria, Landschulheim Schloss Ising [de], having been donated to the school by Thorak's widow in 1961 in lieu of tuition fees for her son.

See also

• Nazi architecture

References

1. Anthony Rhodes, Propaganda: The Art of Persuasion: World War II, New York: Chelsea House, 1976, p. 28.
2. ^ "NS-Strassennamen: Josef Thorak", City of Salzburg, retrieved 27 July 2021 (in German).
3. ^ "Art: Bigger Than Life", Time, 31 July 1950, archived from the original on 31 January 2011.
4. "Josef Thorak". Olympedia. Retrieved 8 August 2020.
5. Albert Speer, Spandau: the Secret Diaries, New York: Macmillan, 1976, p. 261.
6. Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, p260 ISBN 0-393-02030-4
7. F.K.M. Hillenbrand, Underground Humour in Nazi Germany (Routledge 1995), p. 105 ISBN 0-415-09785-1
8. ^ "Putzkraft gesucht, halbtags", Süddeutsche Zeitung, 23 August 2015 (in German).
9. "Verschollene Nazi-Kunst entdeckt" Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 20 May 2015 (in German).
10. "Rechtsstreit um Hitlers Bronzepferde", Der Tagesspiegel, 14 December 2015 (in German).
11. ^ Gabriel Borrud, "Nazi propaganda horse winds up at German school", Deutsche Welle, 12 August 2015.

External links

Media related to Josef Thorak at Wikimedia Commons

• 1889 births
• 1952 deaths
• Artists from Salzburg
• Austrian sculptors
• Austrian male sculptors
• German sculptors
• German male sculptors
• Nazi architecture
• 20th-century sculptors
• Olympic competitors in art competitions