Arno Breker

Arno Breker – Sculpture from birth

Arno Breker was born on 19 July 1900 in Elberfeld, the eldest son of the master stonemason Arnold Breker. His father’s talent was even more pronounced in the son and after attending high school and an apprenticeship in his parent’s business, Arno Breker studied the works of Auguste Rodin and Michelangelo at the Decorative Arts School in Elberfeld. He was also interested in contemporary artists, although a collaboration with the famous sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand did not materialise due to financial difficulties. From 1920, Breker attended the Düsseldorf Art Academy where he had brief contact with the rebellious artists’ circle ‘Das Junge Rheinland’ (The Young Rhineland), but soon distanced himself from their aspirations to instead emulate his great idol, Rodin. Breker also studied architecture with Wilhelm Kreis, the director of the Art Academy, who commissioned him to create the monumental figure of the reclining Aurora, which adorned the roof of the Ehrenhof in Düsseldorf as part of the GeSoLei exhibition, and which already anticipated Breker’s later artistic direction. 

Rise to ‘Michelangelo of the Third Reich’

Arno Breker travelled abroad to South Africa and took extended stays in Paris where he finally settled as a sculptor, and became friends with artists such as Jean Cocteau, Robert Delauney and Man Ray. His return to Germany brought with it his participation in the Berlin Secession exhibition of 1935, but his career slowed as the new National Socialist rulers suspected Breker of being a Francophile avant-gardist. This ended abruptly in 1936 - a moment the artist himself identified as the ‘turning point’ in his life. Arno Breker’s clear homage to the antique sculptures suited the National Socialists and he was suddenly awarded prizes and honourable contracts, joined the NSDAP (National Socialist German Worker’s Party) in 1937, and was soon celebrated as ‘Michelangelo of the Third Reich’; in 1938 he created a bust of Adolf Hitler. He worked with Albert Speer on the expansion of Berlin where prisoners of war had to implement and duplicate his designs in stonemason workshops named after him. Not only Hitler, but Stalin and the French Vichy regime celebrated the German artist. 

Controversial ‘prophet of beauty’ of the post-war period

With the end of the Second World War, almost all of Arno Breker’s work had fallen victim. The sculptor himself fled to Bavaria where he was finally acquitted in the course of denazification – the decisive factor for the lenient sentence was the testimony of some blameless friends that he had saved them from persecution by superiors; the publisher Peter Suhrkamp in particular affirmed under oath that he owed his to life to Breker’s mediation. Nevertheless, in post-war Germany, he faced much hostility; whilst Salvador Dali declared hm the ‘prophet of beauty’, others wanted to complete ban him from the art world and criticised his idealised aesthetic. Despite this, Breker made busts of prominent personalities and distanced himself completely from the National Socialist ideologies in 1981.

Arno Breker died on 13 February 1991 in Düsseldorf.