By Hans Konrad Roethel

The main theme of Martin Mayer's work as a sculptor and graphic artist is the female nude. Naively unquestioning and possessed by an insatiable curiosity, he approaches the same task again and again. His portrait heads and animal sculptures play a subordinate role in comparison.

As self-evident as it may seem to us today for the unclothed human body to be a subject of visual art, it is useful to remember that it was only the Greeks of the fifth century who brought the female nude into being as an ideal sum of feminine forms. The kouros is of an earlier date, and Aphrodite was always clothed in the preceding centuries. The female nude of the Greeks was anything but an imitative representation of nature. It was an abstraction of female beauty and was created by the addition of individual limbs from various models. There is a famous conversation between Socrates and the painter Parrhasios, handed down by Xenophon, about how this kind of synthesis came about: "If you want to reproduce beautiful figures, then, since it is not easy to find a human being in whom everything is impeccable, you add together from many what is most beautiful in each. In this way you achieve that the bodies appear perfect. "

This resulting structure was not only a new theme in the visual arts, but it also represented a new genre that had not existed before. The Venus of Möllendorf or the female idols of the Cylades - not to mention related impressions from the Near East and other cultural regions - are expressions of a pre-Greek cult of fertility rooted in various religious ideas.

Adopted by the Romans, later largely banished from the representational sphere of medieval art, the depiction of the female body was "reborn" during the Renaissance and has lost none of its appeal for today's sculptor. In the twentieth century, Auguste Rodin represents the key figure.

As a grand-disciple of Adolf von Hildebrand – Martin Mayer was a pupil and assistant to Hildebrand's son-in-law Theodor Georgii – he stands on secure ground. In contrast to the academic tradition, however, he is not interested in anatomy in the sense of dissection, but, freeing himself from his knowledge of anatomy, he forms new organic entities that have the female body as their subject. In other words, mastery of the anatomical structure is a prerequisite for his figures, but as such it is virtually irrelevant to the outcome of his artistic endeavours. In his drawings, as in his sculptures, it is the appearance of the model in the wholeness related to its movement that captivates him, not the reflective analysis of the motif. Thus, although his subject matter is connected to an old tradition of sculpture, the way he models is completely unorthodox.

The rounded forms of the female body, especially the buttocks, breasts and thighs, are the focus of his attention. He is almost infatuated with their plumpness. This seductive predilection gives rise to the possibility that the voluptuousness of the forms evokes the idea of sexuality. This is not the case because his creatures, for all their carnality, surprisingly remain in a state of childlike innocence through their impartiality. Even the most exposed display of a female buttocks gives the impression of the grotesque rather than the obscene through its drastic nature. It is the mass as such that is shaped into swelling volumes; not the structure or tension of the skin, not its surface effect, its suppleness or its sheen. The material is largely abstracted. Hair can merge into the curvature of the back without a swell. In his figures, a homogeneous transposition of the various substances such as hair, skin or cloth into the sculptural form is accomplished. Nevertheless, he does not succumb to the danger of a short-circuited "stylisation". A tendency, noticeable about ten years ago, to break the smooth and rounded forms of the female body in such a way that they approached stereometric shapes, was soon abandoned.

The impartiality of his talent and the unacademic nature of his work are echoed in the expressions of his nudes. Their peculiarity is not easy to determine. It is remarkable in this context that the Greeks not only created the female nude as an iconographic type, but that they also already defined the essential in the zone of meaning. In the banquet, Plato speaks of two Aphrodites, the celestial and the common. Martin Mayer's expression of the female nude moves between these poles. Some believe - not without reason - to recognise a Mediterranean note in them. A certain similarity with Maillol and Renoir may have led to this; but on closer examination the differences are probably more pronounced than the similarities. Expressively, they are undoubtedly at home in the North. They are half-awake, childlike creatures who, still completely caught up in themselves - untouched by thought - radiate an affirmation of life and at the same time sometimes a touch of melancholy. The calling and longing they display through posture and gaze resembles the games of those "enfants terribles" who, innocent and seductive at the same time, confuse the senses. Something goblin- or mandrake-like is often expressed in their carefree and provocative abandon. It is characteristic that his crouching and reclining figures often lack the pedestal that creates distance to the viewer. Just as the expressions of his figures hover between sensuality and innocence, so too do their postures appear ambivalent, between the agitation of the momentary and the solidity of the statuesque.
 

Hans Konrad Roethel
Martin Mayer
Thiemig Verlag, München, 1972