Gerhard Marcks - Liegende

Gerhard Marcks

Liegende
1964

Bronze. Height 39 cm, width 99 cm. Artist's mark on left side of plinth, foundry mark "GUSS BARTH BERLIN" and inscription "A" on left edge of plinth. - Vivid dark brown patina. - Rare, one of only two casts.

After an extended hiatus, Gerhard Marcks once again turned to the motif of the reclining female figure in 1964. He had already occupied himself with related models for a version in stone in the early 1940s, but that work was destroyed during the Second World War. An echo of these early explorations can still be found in the “Liegendes Mädchen” from 1948.
With the 1964 “Liegende” that is up for auction here, Marcks arrived at an independent, formally and compositionally reconceived solution by combining aspects of a reclining and rising figure in a fascinating manner: she is lying on her side and leaning on her left forearm, which is crossed by her right arm in a relaxed pose. This crossing of her arms raises her torso in a slightly rotated position. Her bent legs and the softly flowing forms of her body invest the composition with an inner movement situated between rest and latent dynamism.
The rectangular plinth is modelled in the form of a spread-out section of drapery and takes on a central compositional function: its folds converge in lines radiating out from beneath her hip, marking both the body’s centre of gravity and the middle of the plinth.
Together with the bronze sculpture “Schwangere Najade”, which was created the same year, the “Liegende” prepared the way for the large, reclining “Aegina” installed in Bremen’s “Wallanlagen” park.
The bronze sculpture offered here is among the rarest works in Gerhard Marcks’s oeuvre. Besides the present casting – Cast A, the first realisation of the figure – there is only one other known cast which is to be found in the Gerhard-Marcks-Haus in Bremen (cast 1/8. No further copies were cast so far).

Catalogue Raisonné

Rudloff 830; Gerhard Marcks works diary plaster/bronze 615

Certificate

We would like to thank Bildgießerei Richard Barth, Rinteln, for their kind information.

Provenance

Galerie Lempertz Contempora; Private collection, North Rhine-Westphalia (acquired there in the early 2000s); Private ownership, North Rhine-Westphalia

Literature

Gerhard-Marcks-Stiftung, Katalog Sammlung Bremen, 1971, cat. no. 202

Exhibitions

Berlin 1969 (Galerie Nierendorf), Gerhard Marcks - zum achtzigsten Geburtstag, cat. no. 36 with illus.