Youth, forever - sculpture and photographs by Karl Geiser

 

Three photographs of Maurits Onderbeke, model and bicycle racer, circa 1937.

Head, portrait of Maurits Onderbeke, 1937. Three views.

Other models photographed by Geiser.

Two studies of Fritz Morgenthaler, the son of the artist's friends, Sasha and Ernst Morgenthaler, and future psychoanalyst.

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Karl Geiser (22 December 1898, Bern - 5 April 1957, Zurich), Swiss sculptor. The son of a lawyer and university professor - his mother died when he was eleven years old - he rented his first studio in his home town of Bern in October 1918. The following year he received a federal scholarship and traveled to Munich and Berlin in April 1920. After having returned home due to his father’s ill health, he moved to Zurich in 1922. From 1926 he frequently had a studio in Paris, as well as traveling to other European cities. But he mostly lived and worked in Zurich, where he would frequent bars in the industrial district, locations where workers liked to spend their days off, and where he found numerous models to photograph. In 1923 he met a married couple, Sasha and Ernst Morgenthaler, with whom he developed a lifelong relationship. But as early as 1925 he was having sexual encounters with young men, often those who modeled for him; he speaks quite openly in letters of "boy love." And in 1929, he was arrested for the first time for his relationship with an eighteen-year-old. He was awarded important commissions throughout the 1930s, his success only hampered by his extreme perfectionism that resulted in projects being drawn out over years. After another lengthy stay in Paris, he returned to Switzerland in 1939; his Paris studio was taken over during the war, and his art was lost. He was called up for active service in 1940, but continued to produce work throughout the war and beyond. He struggled with depression throughout his life and, from 1944, he suffered from arthritis. He was found dead in his studio at the age of fifty-eight. An autopsy showed that he had taken his own life with sleeping pills about two weeks earlier. 

Two photographs of Karl Geiser, circa 1920s-30s.