Type: Limited edition prints
Size: 33cm x 48cm / 50cm x 65cm
Tirage: 100 copies each
A pencil drawing of The Grand Entrance of The Courtyard of Honour of The New Reich Chancellery (German : Innenhof der Neue Reichskanzlei), flanked with Arno Brekers statues of the “Schwertträger” / “Die Wehrmacht” - Sword Bearer / The Army on the right and “Fackelträger” / “Die Partei” - The Torchbearer / The Party on the left.
This is drawing no. IV of the Reich Collection series.
These were the most famous bronze monumental statues (with a height of 3,2m) created by Breker, commissioned by Albert Speer in 1938.
Jennifer Mundy of the Tate in London said “these two were the cornerstones of the Reich’s spirit and power.”
An excerpt from a historic interview conducted by Andre Müller in 1979 with Arno Breker, in which Breker replies and explains the story behind the statues “Party” and “Army” :
“Speer took me into the Academy of Arts, and I went inside and saw an architectural model which I considered highly successful, an inner courtyard with very good proportions, good profiles, restrained profiles, and so on.
It was a model of the court of honour for the R@ich Chancellery. I liked it, and I saw the two blocks on each side of the the staircase leading to the entranceway.
My figures were to make sweeping gestures away from the entrance, and to have a relationship to the building. […]
In my view, the only sensible embellishment was to set a spiritual man on one side, symbolized by a flame, and on the other, the defender of the country, a man with a sword.
So I set to work on it at home, and came back two weeks later with my sketches. They were displayed, and Speer didn’t say much. Then we parted. He immediately called H, who saw them and was instantly enthralled. The names of the figures, «Party» and «Wehrmacht,» were his invention.”
