By Heinz Spielmann
Emphasising the origins and elective affinities of an artist can both promote and restrict the understanding of his work - promote, because the conscious turning of an artist towards a tradition reveals something about himself, restrict, because commonalities with a tradition can easily cloud or push into the background the recognition of the particular and individual. In this respect, the sculptor Martin Mayer is no different from others who feel indebted to a heritage without giving up their individuality. Born in Berlin, he studied in Munich under Adolf von Hildebrand's son-in-law Theodor Georgii and later moved into Hildebrand's former studio. He always understood this tradition as an obligation, but in an unreflective way he was always too independent, always too naïve in the Schillerian sense, perhaps also too North German, to derive from the traditions of his elective kinship any obligations that would pin him down or restrict him. Gerhard Marcks already recognised this when he got hold of a catalogue of the thirty-six-year-old and, referring to his own encounter with Hildebrand, traced the special nature of his young colleague in relation to the "Isar air".
Martin Mayer always understood sculpture as an art of the human form, he never doubted that this art had its own laws, but he never saw a classical canon as its prerequisite - always life itself. From the beginning, he directed his eyes directly to expressions of life, to postures and gestures in space, never to staged, balanced poses, doctrinal contrapposto or calculated, statuesque proportions.
This illustrated book shows how consistent and unperturbed this understanding of sculpture and this self-image remained for Martin Mayer throughout his life. It gives an account of more than fifty years of his work, emphasising his draughtsmanship but also pointing towards his sculptural works as a regulative element of his drawings and prints. These drawings are undoubtedly enduring in themselves, but they are committed to the same content as the figures: The sensual understanding of the body in space and as a breathing volume. Often they precede the realisation of a sculptural form as a first step, just as often they paraphrase a pictorial idea in numerous variations, presenting more possibilities than a sculptor can create in figures throughout his whole life. Franz Roh already pointed out the diversity in unity that characterises the work of this sculptor.
The public is probably more familiar with Martin Mayer's large robed figures – such as his Franziskus in Munich, his Luther in Landau, his Jakobspilger in Speyer or the powerful nude figure of the Triumphans in the Munich Olympic Park – than with his drawings and statuettes. We know his portraits, for example those of the abbot Jakobus Pfättisch or the philosopher Ernst Bloch. Although anyone who knows them alone can certainly appreciate the quality of this sculptor, one can only gain an adequate idea of it if one has seen Mayer's pictures, portraits, and sculptures of women. They are at the centre of his life's work. This main theme and leitmotif has determined his art for more than fifty years without any sign of fatigue. What Henry Moore once said in conversation with regard to his "Reclining Figures" also applies to Martin Mayer's female figures: If some dictator told him to devote himself to this one subject only, it would not bother him, for it contained more possibilities than could be realised in his life.
When the sensitive photographer Herbert List, who was familiar with classical verisimilitude in the most compelling way, published a booklet in 1965 and a coffee-table book on Martin Mayer in 1972, he already made the artist's representations of women the focus of these publications by devoting the majority of illustrations to them. Now, more than a third of a century later, the present volume undertakes the same in a comprehensive way. It shows the woman as the being without whom there is no life, no self-forgetting sensuality, no vitality, no occasion for sculpture. He makes her present as if no one were watching her. None of these women pose, certainly not as models trying to conform to a canon of beauty. Mayer's nude drawings are not mere exercises, as almost every sculptor carries out in the training of his craft and as a way to control his métier; they must be regarded as a central part of his work, they represent the quintessence of his oeuvre as a whole just as much as his bronzes.
There is nothing staged or voyeurish about the sculptor's photographs, which are included in this compendium of his drawings and bronzes to help us understand their genesis, since the photographs make it appear as if no one was paying attention to the nude models at all, they are viewed so discreetly and free of intentions. To illustrate their impartiality, try comparing them to the calculatedly staged "nudes" of another Berlin based artist, the photographer Herbert Newton.
The women in Martin Mayer's drawings present themselves the same way as in his photographs. They stand or sit in unconstrained poses, bend, loll, squat, crouch, or kneel, as they see fit – in an almost animalistic indolence. They sleep, undress, wash and dry themselves, comb their hair and show themselves unselfconsciously from all sides as living works of art, oblivious devoid of shame and shyness. The drawings, which were obviously made in a short time in front of these models left to their own devices, reveal an unusual pace of observation, they record rapidly changing postures, but despite the speed of the stroke they remain the notes of a sculptor, that is: pictures of bodies in space. With vehement hatching that models the bodies, volumes stand out from the darkness. However, Martin Mayer can also capture space with outlines, the most challenging test for the mastery of drawing as a medium of seeing bodies three-dimensionally.
Chronology has no real significance to Mayer's drawings. All interpreters have observed this with regard to his bronzes. The same themes and freedom in the manner of representation were present in his drawings from the beginning. At most, some of the sheets from the early fifties appear somewhat firmer, a little more angularly structured - probably due to the fact that they depict robed figures. The forms of the nudes are also emphasised in this period by more decisive delimitations. From the sixties onwards, however, they gain the freedom that has been preserved to this day, which is characterised by an open form despite the unambiguousness of the content.
The order of the following plates explains, without commentary, the assignment of the drawings to statues and statuettes of a similar theme in each case. This juxtaposition allows us to observe how the bronzes transfer changing visual experiences into tangible form. Of course, the liberal strokes of the drawings cannot be transformed directly into the modelled form, its open structure into the sculptural volume. It would lose its decisiveness and clarity. The bronzes - both the smaller and the larger-than-life ones - transform moments and occasions, chance and change into universal results. In sculpture, this universality always means: form according to an - albeit hidden - spatial mathematics, in this case not Euclidean but spherical stereometry with its bulges, curves, and organic gradients, the stereometry of organic bodies and growth. Werner Haftmann called it the "swelling force "* of volumes that grows from within. It does not follow statics, is not oriented towards horizontals and verticals; it corresponds to the restrained movements of models that only last for a moment because a temporary state of equilibrium has been reached, that fertile moment that Lessing described as the binding criterion of sculpture. Hildebrand would probably have objected to such a view, which reveals the legacy of the Baroque, the binding nature of pathos formulas, for he did not regard a moment in constant change but the calm statuary of the unchanging as the goal of sculpture.
As closely as Martin Mayer is connected with Munich and its sculptural tradition, his chosen relatives can also be found in the north with regard to his depictions of women. One thinks of Georg Kolbe's dancers, Richard Scheibe's Fortuna, Gustav Seitz's pleasingly sensual nudes. Martin Mayer took a step forward in their tradition, a great step that proves him to be an independent sculptor and draughtsman, proving that the art of figures has by no means reached its end. Its further development and renewal, however, requires the experience of life.
Heinz Spielmann
Martin Mayer: Frauen – Bronzen Zeichnungen Fotografien
Edition Braus, Heidelberg, 2002
ISBN 978-3-89904-008-1