'Ich bin ein Plastiker'

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe should be taken seriously when he calls himself a "sculptor." He created models himself. As a designer of monuments, advisor to Johann Gottfried Schadow and Christian Friedrich Tieck, and friend of Christian Daniel Rauch, as a poet with his own sculptural ideas, and as a morphologist with a dynamic concept of form, the formation of self and responsibility for the world are his themes. This study deals for the first time with Goethes engagement with sculpture and also reveals his unwritten sculptural aesthetics. What do "sensual laws of art," the unity of "language and sculpture," rhythm, metamorphosis, the power of education, and "organic whole" mean for him? It is shown that these keywords also interested modern sculptors like Andreu Alfaro, Joseph Beuys, Eduardo Chillida, Ewald Mataré, or Henry Moore.