Bust of Adolf Hitler, bronze 1939. Displayed at the City Museum of the German town Düsseldorf. The picture was taken in March 2003.
Foto Copyright EKS/Marco VR, Bonn
Bust of Adolf Hitler, bronze 1939. Displayed at the City Museum of the German town Düsseldorf. The picture was taken in March 2003.
Foto Copyright EKS/Marco VR, Bonn
Düsseldorf (bpb) The Stadtmuseum Düsseldorf (City Museum) has a bronze bust Adolf Hitler on display. This authentic work was created by Arno Breker. The bust of the Reichskanzler (Chancellor of the Reich) is to be seen in the exhibition "Düsseldorf und der National-Sozialismus". (Düsseldorf in the time of National Socialism). The bronze bust is on loan from the Düsseldorf Art Museum, according to the curator of the exhibition.
Arno Breker (1900 - 1991) was a leading European artist of his time. He belonged to the group of artists favoured in the Third Reich, such as the Austrian sculptor Josef Thorak, the German sculptor George Kolbe and others. The person Hitler was in his time a most requested motive for artists. Many paintings, sculptures and reliefs of his portrait are proofs of this fact until now.
But the portrait of the Fuehrer, created by Breker, was not for sale to the public. Copies of this artwork were officially donated for certain reasons to institutions, offices and high-ranking persons of the Third Reich.
The first copy of the bust was cast 1939 in the foundry of Noack in Berlin. As Breker reported in 1975, this foundry received many commissions from the government in the Nazi times. After the end of World War II in 1945, the foundry was working for international artists such as the British sculptor Henry Moore. His monumental sculpture titled "Large Two Forms" was purchased by the West German government, in the time of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who belonged to the Social Democratic Party (SPD). The Moore sculpture is to be seen in Bonn on the Rhine river.
Arno Breker was the "Number One" portraitist of the 20th century. The sculptor did portraits of Friedrich Ebert, Adolf Hitler, Hindenburg, Albert Speer, Konrad Adenauer, Ludwig Erhard, Charles de Gaulle, Leopold Sedar Senghor, the Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, Felix Houphouet-Boigny (Ivory Coast), as well as of more than a hundred artists, musicians, athletes, industrialists and scientists.
Copyright 2003 West-Art, Prometheus 86/2003