Toni Stadler (1888 - 1982)

Classical sculptural drawings - the stimulus remains the human figure

On Toni Stadler's Work

The Grafos prints are drawings done by a sculptor. Two sitting female nudes and the head of a boy. Stadler recalls: 'For Maillol, the sensual experience was the inspiration. An undogmatic way to reveal the female element, to nearly transfer, shall we say, the female scent onto the sculpture. That was what Maillol was after, not some obstinate attempt at achieving similarity.' Stadler recognizes the lighting of form in the volumes of stone, and this nearly stony surface texture is even perceptible in his bronzes and graphic works.

Stadler's early sculptural work was oriented towards the fuller examples of classical ideals, then leant towards the stark forms of early Ancient Greece, towards the ancient simplicity, the closed, symbolic corporeality. There are torsos of boys with their elbows jutting out which look like jugs, or 'Henkelkrügen' (1962). Its as if they were molded from clay or carved of wood in a single stroke and then, in the late 60's cast in bronze. In 1970, the torso becomes the focus. Into the late 70's, Stadler was taken with the desire to portray the homogenous and amorphous nature of the torso as the life-giving core, without further accessories or additional gestures. His drawings highlight this development towards simplification, though his figures can seem surprisingly Baroque, with female volumes full of movement surging forth from a central core, as the title to his series 'Die Woge' (The Wave) indicates.

Toni Stadler began his artistic trajectory anew after World War 2. The war had decimated his existing works. Stadler's luck in this evil time was that he was not interested in monumental pieces and related works. The political situation had thus not really marked his work but only slowed it down. Decisive for the change was his contact to works by Marino Marini and other great artists of modern art: Henri Laurens, Alberto Giacometti and Henry Moore. Despite this, Stadler remained a follower of classic proportions. Although he found recognition in his lifetime, it was only in his later years that he arrived at his unmistakable style. He directed his ideas towards an intermediate form lying somewhere between container and sculpture. He was concerned with the 'inner swelling force of form'. The stimulus was in the human figure. His monument to George Marshall in Frankfurt (there are some less monumental commissions) from 1963 is the transferal into plastic form of the >Trias der Quellnymphen= (Triad of Fountain Nymphs). In 1964 he sculpts the large reclining figure of Aegeus. His drawings often display sculptural elements even more than his bronzes. His sketches also seem abstracter, which can also be said of his later 'Reclining Figure in Bronze' (1966) or of the movement-filled development of form in the whole of his 'Die Woge' (1967) and in his Nereid figures on the Karl-Amadeus-Hartmann Fountain (1971). Stadler only later turned to the technique of constructing the figure from two rolled clay slabs. What Stadler achieved earlier in his bronzes with a heavy hammer he did later with this new technique. Stadler arrived at a new free manner with form and a refreshing sensuality which reaffirmed his own work. In the artist's words: 'It is the decisive factor: the best side of my nature is the eroticism which I have allowed to lead me, as opposed to beauty.' Rhythm and the interchangeable nature of form. To overcome traditional skill before the model in order to give spontaneity room - this became the process of his entire life's work. ek