Lot 323 D

Gerhard Marcks's “Schwimmerin II” (Swimmer II) is based on a portrait of his daughter Brigitte, who was born in 1916. In 1952 the artist turned once again to the sculpture from 1938 - which shows Brigitte in life-size and with toned, well-developed muscles - and made slight changes to the hairstyle. His second daughter, Ute, who was born in 1921, served as model in this case.
The important sculpture “Schwimmerin II” - which is represented by casts in Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie and in Krefeld's Kaiser-Wilhelm-Museum, among other places - illustrates Marcks's reception of classical and archaic antiquity, transposed into the idiom of his own individual 'hand'. Within this personal portrait, the sculpture depicts a universal, timeless image of the contemplative concentration that precedes every athletic activity.
“In the constants of standing, sitting, crouching, lying down, he tracked down the accord between the outward and the inward motion, examined the interaction and harmony of a given canon of forms, explored the rhythm of the course of a line, volume and axis. Particularly in the case of the female nude, he was ultimately interested in only one thing: beauty” (Martina Rudloff, Venus Urania hat keinen Namen, in: Gerhard Marcks-Stiftung 1993, op. cit., p. 101).