Ernst Seger, Sportlerin

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				Price: USD 190,000

Description

Ernst Seger, ‘Sportlerin’ (‘Female-sporter’).
Biography: Ernst Seger

Life size bronze.
Displayed at the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung 1939, room 7.
Created around 1933.
A first plaster-version of 1913 was displayed under the name ‘Amazone’ at the ‘Grose Berliner Kunstausstellung 1914’ (source: Van Ham Archives).

— displayed at the exhibition ‘Art in the Third Reich, Seduction and Distraction’, November 2023 – March 2024, Museum Arnhem, The Netherlands —

Ernst Seger, ‘Sportler’, displayed at the GDK 1939, room7.

‘Germany does not need woman who can dance beautifully at five o’clock teas, but woman who have given proof of their health through accomplishments in the field of sports…The javelin and diving-board are more usefull than lipstick in promoting health’, Frankfurter Zeitung 1937.

The Aryan ideal
The cult-like fascination with the naked body was already very popular in the early part of the 20th century. This trend strengthened in intensity when the Nazis garnered power. The ideas of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, founder of the German Gymnastics Association in the beginning of the 19th century, were widely propagated. The healthy Aryan body was seen as a bastion against Latin, Asian or other foreign forms. Painting and sculpting celebrated the naked body in ecstatic poses. A new feeling for the body had emerged; the Aryan body.
Nazi magazines wrote, for example, about Lucas Cranach who dared to advance much further than the Italian Renaissance, Albrecht Dürer or the Dutch painters. ‘He restored to her proper place in life the German woman and mother who had been debased as an instrument of concupiscence by medieval asceticism, and placed her slender, naked body in its tree-like beauty as a symbol of grace and fertility amidst the budding and growing life of the German landscape’.
The SS magazine Das Schwarze Korps (The Black Corps) advertised, ‘… we want a strong and joyful affirmation of body awareness, because we need it to build a strong and self-confident race’. Nudity was seen partly as a means of encouraging the ‘health of the race’.
The ‘Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung‘, 1934 writes for example about a femal javelin thrower: ‘Eine Nordmark-Amazone. Eine hochgewachsene, prachtvoll durchtrainierte Leichtathletin, aufgenommen auf dem Sportplatz einer Frauenschule in der Nordmark‘ (‘An Amazon from the Nordmark. A beautiful adult, a fully trained athlete; photo taken at the sport-field of a women school in the Nordmark‘).

‘Sportlerin’ by Ernst Seger, displayed at the exhibition ‘Art in the Third Reich, Seduction and Distraction’, Museum Arnhem, The Netherlands, November 2023 – March 2024. Photo’s: Eva Broekema.  

‘Sportlerin’ by Seger, depicted in the exhibition catalog ‘Art in the Third Reich’ by Jelle Bouwhuis and Almar Seinen, 2023.

Ernst Seger, a first gips-version of 1913, displayed under the name ‘Amazone’ at the ‘Grose Berliner Kunstausstellung 1914’ (source: Van Ham Archives).
Below: ‘Amazone’ by Seger, depicted on a ‘FGW Berlin’ Postcards.
The Fotografischer Großvertrieb Wiesental (‘FGW’), was a sales cooperation or a distribution platform through which F.G. Zeitz’s postcard publisher delivered its genuine photo cards While F.G. Zeitz took the photos and produced the cards in Berlin (later in Königssee/Oberbayern), the large-scale photographic distributor Wiesental managed the logistics and mass distribution. On many historical postcards from the 1930s to the 1960s, ‘FGW’ is printed in a curved font or in combination with a serial number.
 

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