Profile of Arno Breker on Famous Like Me

Arno Breker (b. July 19, 1900 - d. February 13, 1991) was a German sculptor best known for being endorsed by the National Socialists in Adolf Hitler's Germany.

Breker proudly took National Socialist commissions from 1933 through 1942, for example participating in a show of his work in occupied Paris in 1942, and maintained personal relationships with Albert Speer and with Hitler. The neo-classical nature of his work, with titles like "Comradeship", "Torchbearer", and "Sacrifice", typified the characteristics of Nazi architecture. On closer inspection, though, the proportions of his figures, the highly colouristic treatment of his surfaces (the strong contrasts between dark and light accents), and the melodramatic tension of their musculatures perhaps invites comparison with the Italian Mannerist sculptors of the 16th century. This Mannerist tendency to Breker's neoclassicism may suggest closer affinities to concurrent expressionistic tendencies in German Modernism than is usually acknowledged.

His twin sculptures "The Party" and "The Army" held a prominent position at the entrance to the Reich Chancellery.

Breker received the Olympic Silver Medal for Art in 1936, and was a professor of visual arts in Berlin, until the fall of the Third Reich. After the war approximately 90% of his work was lost.

The Arno Breker Museum was inaugurated in 1985.

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