Beschreibung:

Gerhard Marcks (German, 1889-1981) Büffelkuh, 1953 Ciphered and stamped "...RICH. BARTH BLN. MARIENDORF" on the underside. Bronze with dark brown patina, 14 3/16 x 20 7/8 x 6 in. (36.0 x 53.0 x 15.2 cm). Condition: Minor abrasions. Literature: Rudloff, Martina. Gerhard Marcks 1889-1981: Retrospektive. Munchen: Hirmer, 1989, p. 307 (illus.); Blaum, Rudolf, et al. Gerhard Marcks Und Die Antike. Heidelberg: Edition Braus, 1993 (illus.); Marcks, Gerhard and Martina Rudloff. Gerhard Marcks Das Plastische Werk. Frankfurt: Propylaen Verlag, 1977 (illus. pl. 52), no. 609. N.B. Animals were an early subject for Marcks, and one he revisited after World War II. In an essay on his work between the years of 1951 to 1961, Marcks recalls Myron's Cow, which was praised by both Pliny and Goethe as expressing qualities above mere naturalistic representation--balance and harmony--in discussing his own complicated feelings about animals as his muse. "Animals were my first friends and models," he writes, noting that when life was difficult "I again escaped to the [Berlin] Zoo, fancying that I could find peace only with animals--creatures who wanted nothing of me, and of whom I wanted nothing but permission to admire them." (1) It was his growing empathy with animals, however, that lead him eventually to disregard the zoo as "imprisonment. "I saw them now exactly in correspondence to ourselves, often cruelly deformed by slavery...but always undisguised, in their unambiguous expressive power." (2) (1) Marcks, Gerhard. "Gerhard Marks on his Life and Work." The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Spring 1961), p. 519. (2) Ibid.