Size: 20x18cm./7.8x7inch.
Weight: 1337gr./47.1inch.
VIDEO
 
Beautiful bust of Karl Marx made by Lev Kerbel. The bust is made of plaster and on some spots the paint is gone. Someby in time filled the white spots in with a grey color. In the German city of Chemnitz there still is this gigantic bust of Karl Marx present. Lev Efimovich Kerbel (1917-2003) was a sculptor of Soviet realist works. Kerbel’s creations included statues of Marx, Lenin, Yuri Gagarin, which were sent by Soviet Government as gifts to socialist and the Third World countries across the world.
In the 1990s following the collapse of the socialist bloc many of his works of art were destroyed. However his enormous Karl Marx monument in Chemnitz, formerly Karl-Marx-Stadt, has been preserved as a cultural monument.
Kerbel was born to a Russian Jewish family in the village of Semyonovka in Russia (currently Ukraine) on the day that the Winter Palace in Petrograd was stormed by the Bolsheviks setting off the October Revolution.
During World War II, Kerbel helped build the defenses for the Battle of Moscow, then served in the Northern Fleet.
After the war, Kerbel’s career took off with a wide range of commissions. In 1958 he sculpted a statue in China that depicted a huge Soviet and an equally large Chinese worker hand in hand. When Soviet-Chinese relations foundered a few years later, the statue was torn down by a mob. While some people dismiss Kerbel’s works as a form of flat Communist propaganda, Kerbel himself said that he was always more interested in art than politics. Many people now view his few remaining statues with nostalgia, particularly in Chemnitz (formerly known as Karl Marx Stadt, where his bust of Karl Marx is referred to as ‘the head’.
One of Kerbel’s last works was the memorial to the crew of the Kursk submarine, inaugurated in Moscow in 2003.