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89 MARX, Karl. Bronze bust by Johannes Friedrich Rogge. German Democratic Republic: Johannes Friedrich Rogge, 1959 marx as permanent figurehead A striking example of East Germany’s cult of Karl Marx, sculpted by Dr Rogge (1898–1983), a German artist specializing in political busts and monuments. In 1951, he sculpted the GDR’s first official monument to Lenin, which was unveiled the same year on 23 December, Stalin’s official birthday. In 1883, Friedrich Engels began distributing large numbers of copies of the photograph of Marx taken by John Maynall in 1875, and it was this image which provided the visual template of Marx iconography for the next century. Following the formation of the Soviet Union, his image began to feature on posters at political rallies, with this practice adopted and extended to other contexts and media across the communist bloc in the early Cold War. Reverence for the giants of the communist pantheon, however, raised a number of knotty theoretical dilemmas concerning bourgeois commodification and consumption. For Lenin, art was “just an appendage”, to be excised when it no longer served
its proper propaganda purpose – what was a loyal communist to make of Marx’s artistic incarnation here in bronze? As with many of his contemporaries, Rogge’s career was shaped by the course of German politics either side of the Second World War. Active from the 1920s onwards, his oeuvre in the 1930s included busts of Adolf Hitler. Following the Second World War, he switched to communist iconography, securing several notable commissions in the early years of the GDR. Bronze bust, 230 × 175 × 160 mm, with the maker’s inscription at the rear. In fine condition with drilled holes and light scratching to base where sometime mounted on a plinth. £5,500 [150448] 90 MEIR, Golda. My Life. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1975 First US edition, first printing, inscribed by the author on a slip of her letterhead mounted to the front free endpaper “To Harriet Montefiore greetings Golda Meir December 1975”. Golda Meir served as the fourth prime minister of Israel, from 1969 to 1974, the only woman to hold the role. Her memoirs
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