Thanks to at home for joining us this hour. I'm really happy to have you here. Glad you're with us.

So Gerhard Marx was his name. It was a sculptor, a very famous sculptor, considered to be one of the greatest European sculptors of the whole 20th century.

Gerhard Marx was German, though. And during the Third Reich, when he was making his art, the German government, the Nazis, they decided that Gerhard Marx's art was degenerate.

He wasn't Jewish, but he was fired from his teaching job in Germany after he tried to protect his Jewish students from the Nazis, after he protested

against Jewish faculty members being removed from their posts at the school where he taught.

So he lost his job as well.

The Nazis didn't just fire him from teaching.

They banned him from showing his work.

They banned him from selling his work.

They actually confiscated some of his sculptures

and melted them down. They said they needed the metal to make weapons for the German army.

So it was a little bit of a miracle that Gerhard Marx survived World War II in Germany, but he did.

It's even more of a miracle that some of his sculptures survived World War II in Germany, but he did. It's even more of a miracle that some of his sculptures survived World War II in Germany.

But they did. Not long after the end of World War II in 1949,

one of his surviving sculptures actually came to the United States.

There was a big, important international sculpture

show in Philadelphia in 1949, and Gerhard Marx brought this statue to that show. It is seven

feet tall. It's called Maya, MAJA. And it's a, it's considered to be a monumental work, but also representative of his style.

It's exactly the kind of expressive, modernist, but very human thing that the Nazis hated about Gerhard Marx and his art.

That said, Philadelphia loved it. The big public art association in Philly

that had put on the sculpture show, they bought the sculpture from him, and for years it had

pride of place and overlooked the big famous terrace at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. A few years

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