Habicht [Hawk]

Gerhard Marcks

"Habicht" (Hawk) was done in 1922, the period when Marks was at the Bauhaus teaching ceramics. In 1920 he was encouraged by fellow Bauhaus teacher Lyonel Feininger to try woodcut as a medium. Many of his woodcuts from this time featured modernist compositions of animals, especially cats. The edition sizes were not noted.

In 1922 Germany, after WWI, the government was in flux and political upheaval. The new Chancellor, businessman Wilhelm Cuno, manager of the Hamburg-America Line, formed a new cabinet, largely composed of deputies of the bourgeois coalition in addition to Cuno, who did not belong to any party and in fact was not a member of the Reichstag when he first took over.

Marcks created an abstracted villagescape over which a hawk attacks a dove, plucked from a flock that fly off in the distance. Marcks intentionally carved the image on an out-of-square block, adding to the tension of the composition.