Culture | True copies

A workshop in Berlin offers masterpieces to the world

It is the last of the traditional plaster-cast centres to make hundreds of moulds available to all comers

Masterpieces for all
|BERLIN

“WE’RE EXPERT at 3D-puzzles,” chuckles Stefan Kramer. He slots in the last of some hard, toffee-coloured pieces of plaster that trace the folds of a cloak, mindful that the innermost recesses will soon be the outer contours of a delicate copy of a masterpiece. When the cast is dry the pieces will be gently removed, one by one.

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Mr Kramer is production manager at the Gipsformerei, the plaster-cast manufactury of Berlin State Museums. Since early 2017 his team has been making a copy of a swathe of the huge, high-relief frieze around the base of the Pergamon Altar—a pinnacle of Hellenistic art, dating from the second century BC—for the China Academy of Art (CAA), based in Hangzhou. The Gigantomachy Frieze, as it is known, is 4.5 metres high and unfolds over 120 metres. It depicts a battle between Olympian gods and earth-bound giants, their bodies hurtling naked and clothed. “It’s more than a sculpture, it’s a legend,” says Gao Shiming of the CAA. The copy will be the first major classical artefact in its collection.

In an age of anxiety about intellectual property, it might seem odd that Berlin State Museums are happy to make a copy of perhaps their most prized and popular treasure. But the Gipsformerei sees itself as part of a tradition stretching back to Renaissance Italy, where artists learned from casts of ancient statues. The survival of this old mimetic craft points to enduring questions about art and originality, and offers fresh potential for cultural exchange.

Interest in plaster casts spread across Europe in the 17th century, and workshops to supply them followed. Berlin’s was founded by the King of Prussia in 1819. By the 20th century the deluge of copies was provoking consternation. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, published in 1935, Walter Benjamin, himself a Berliner, noted how an artwork lost its “aura” by being reproduced. “Copies were held to be ever-more worthless,” says Miguel Helfrich, the Gipsformerei’s director. “Museums threw out whole plaster-cast collections, and downsized or closed their plaster workshops.”

These days, museums in the other traditional plaster-cast centres of Paris, London, Brussels and Copenhagen offer a limited selection of casts for sale or none at all. With more than 7,000 moulds, says Mr Helfrich, the Gipsformerei is “unique in offering casts of every mould to all comers”. He sells 100 to 200 a year, mainly to museums, though also to artists and architects. “If you want a large work of the highest quality, you have to come to us.”

For form, texture and durability, he reckons, plaster-cast is superior to modern techniques such as silicone moulds. And the age of the plaster moulds—some date back two centuries—confers an extra “archaeological value”. “Many of our copies document a condition which many originals no longer enjoy,” Mr Helfrich explains. Some 500-600 are of works lost or damaged during the second world war. Moulds of parts of the Gigantomachy Frieze, for example, were taken in 1890, shortly after the Pergamon Altar was brought to Berlin from what is now western Turkey. They thus record the frieze’s appearance before the Red Army took it in pieces to St Petersburg, where it was kept from 1945 to 1958. The chariot statue on the Brandenburg Gate is another product of the collection.

The idea that a historic mould can, in Mr Helfrich’s words, “preserve an artwork’s DNA”, has led to a reassessment of the Gipsformerei by Berlin State Museums. Extra space will soon help to accommodate its dual role as maker of copies and guardian of art history. This first show in a new gallery—designed by the architect David Chipperfield and opening in the summer of 2019—will mark the workshop’s bicentennial. Veronika Tocha, the curator of that exhibition, says plaster copies should be seen as works of art with their own distinct biographies. Artists such as Jeff Koons use copies of historical sculptures, she notes; Rachel Whiteread has worked in plaster.

Meanwhile the largest series of casts ever produced by the Gipsformerei will be shipped to Hangzhou in early 2019, with more to follow. As taking moulds directly from the original frieze is now forbidden, the staff are working on a new hybrid involving laser scanning and traditional mould-making. For his part, Mr Gao hopes he will be able to display a full copy of the Gigantomachy Frieze at the CAA in two or three years’ time. He wants contemporary Chinese artists to be inspired by it. “Our frieze is more than a copy,” he says. “It’s an intellectual proposition.”

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "True copies"

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