Josef Thorak

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Josef Thorak (7 February 1889 in

Early life and education

Thorak was born out of wedlock in Vienna. His father, also Josef Thorak, was from

In Berlin in the 1920s, Thorak lived mainly on commissions to design cemetery monuments for soldiers, also assisting wealthy friends, many of them Jewish, with design work. He was helped by friendships with Hjalmar Schacht, President of the Reichsbank, and above all with the art museum director Wilhelm von Bode, who wrote a monograph on Thorak in 1929,^[1][3] said to have been his only book on a living artist.^[4] He won a state prize in 1928. To promote himself, he began calling himself "professor". His commissions were reduced by the German economic crisis of the 1920s and the Great Depression; eventually in 1932 he received a commission to design fittings for a church in Tegel,^[1] and he entered work in the sculpture event in the art competition at the 1932 Summer Olympics.^[5]

After the Nazis

With Arno Breker, he became one of the two "official sculptors" of the Third Reich.^[3][7] In 1937, he was named professor of sculpture at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts; in 1939, Hitler decreed that a studio should be built for him in Baldham to Albert Speer's design.^[1][2] Although he did not join the Nazi Party until 1941, Hitler ordered his membership backdated to 1933 for appearance's sake.^[4] After a visit with Hitler to Thorak's studio in 1937, Goebbels described him in his diary as "our greatest sculptural talent. He needs to be given commissions."^[1] In his Spandau Diaries written in prison after the war, Speer referred to Thorak as "more or less my sculptor, who frequently designed statues and reliefs for my buildings".^[8] Well known for his "grandiose monuments",^[9] Thorak was nicknamed "Professor Thorax" because of his preference for muscular neo-classical nude sculpture,^[10] typically "gazing fervently into the distance".^[11] In the late 1930s, he became less popular with the Nazi leadership than Breker, because of his less voluptuous female nudes; he returned to favour during the war years after producing female statues expressing pathos.^[2]

Later life and death

After the

• 1922: Der sterbende Krieger (The Dying Warrior), World War I memorial in Stolpmünde, now Ustka, Poland
• 1928: Heim (Home) and Arbeit (Work), Charlottenburg^[2]
• 1936: Boxer, modelled on Max Schmeling, one of many sculptures commissioned for the grounds of the Olympic Stadium in Berlin.^[1][12]
• 1937: Familie (The Family) and Kameradschaft (Comradeship): 23-foot-tall figural groups outside the German pavilion at the
  Paris World's Fair,^[1][2][13] the latter consisting of two nude males clasping hands and standing defiantly side by side in a pose of racial camaraderie.^[14]
• 1937–43: Goddess of Victory sculptural group for the
  Nazi party rally grounds at Nuremberg, unfinished^[1][2]
• 1940: Der königliche Reiter (The Royal Rider), model for an equestrian monument to Frederick the Great in Linz, exhibited in 1943^[1][2]
• 1941: Couple^[15]
• 1942: Letzter Flug (Last Flight), wartime sculpture of a woman holding a dead soldier^[2][16]
• The Judgement of Paris, for a fountain.^[17]
• 1943: Paracelsus, commissioned for Salzburg^[1]
• 1943: Copernicus, also in Salzburg^[1]
• Denkmal der Arbeit (Monument to Work), for the Reichsautobahn: model exhibited in 1938–39, work unfinished. A group of workers (variously described as three, four, or five), 17 metres (56 ft) high, straining to move a boulder.^[17][18][19]
• 1949: Pietà, St. Peter's Cemetery, Salzburg, now over his grave^[1][2]

Reich Chancellery striding horses

In 1939, Thorak sculpted three oversize horses (3 metres (9.8 ft) high) for the Nuremberg rally grounds.

Thorak received the grand prize of the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1928 and a golden Papal medal in 1934 for his contribution to the Exhibition for International Christian Art. He was nominated in 1937 for the first German National Prize for Art and Science. A street was named for him in Salzburg in 1963.^[1][2][4]

• 
  Dying Warrior (1922) Ustka
• 
  Home (1928) Charlottenburg
• 
  Last Flight (1942), exhibition postcard
• 
  Paracelsus (1943) Salzburg
• 
  Pietà (1949) and grave, Salzburg

See also

• Nazi art
• Nazi architecture

References