Background
Joseph Thorak was born in Salzburg on 7 February 1889, the son of a potter.
Joseph Thorak was born in Salzburg on 7 February 1889, the son of a potter.
Already well known in the 1920s as a freelance sculptor who worked especially in wax, Thorak was influenced by the old Austrian baroque tradition with its strong musical elements and developed an idiosyncratic, sensitive treatment of plastic forms. Trained as a craftsman, the muscle- bound sculptor, whose many portrait busts of politicians included one of Field Marshal von Hindenburg, received the State prize of the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1928.
During the Third Reich, Thorak became a representative artist of National Socialism with his giant bronze and marble figures of muscular men and heavy-hipped, taut, equally powerful female figures. His marble statue Two Humans was singled out for praise by Hitler as an example of ‘healthy Nordic eros' in contrast to the ‘sensual sex' of the 1920s.
From 1937 Professor at the Academy of Visual Arts in Munich, Thorak was commissioned to sculpt busts of Hitler and Mussolini and some of the monumental figures which flanked the entrances to the new Reich Chancellery. He also worked on such projects as the fashioning of the Berlin Reich sports ground. On Hitler’s orders a huge studio was built for him in Upper Bavaria, where he sculpted fifty-four-feet high figures for the Reich Autobahnen. After the war Thorak went into retreat but, after he was cleared by a Munich de-Nazification court, began working again on various commissions, including statues for a cloister in Linz.
He died on 26 February 1952 at Hartmannsberg in the rural district of Rosenheim, Upper Bavaria.
