[1] Rudolf Belling (1886 – 1972) was a German sculptor. From 1933 on, Belling had no chance to work in his home country. His works were marked degenerate, many of them were melted down or smashed. As his political opinions were also not in conformity with the Nazi regime, he was banned from working as well as from his membership of the Prussian Academy of Arts, Berlin. The academy president advised him in the name of the Minister of Education and Arts to resign.
In 1935 Rudolf Belling stayed for eight months in New York City, where he had an exhibition in the Weyhe Gallery with his most important works from the Modern Classic Period. He also gave courses of lectures on modern sculpture and his own theories. America offered him a marvellous possibility at that time to live his life there.
He returned to Germany because his nine-year-old son Thomas was in danger there since his mother, Rudolf Belling’s first wife, had been Jewish. He succeeded in saving his son and emigrated once again, in 1937, this time to Istanbul, Turkey. He lived and worked there for thirty years.
From 1937 on he was professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul, re-organizing the department of sculpture and mediating introductions towards modern art, basing his work on traditional studies. In 1939 he managed to fly out his son illegally from Berlin to Turkey. In 1942 he married his second wife Yolanda Carolina Manzini, who was from an Italian-German family, and in 1943 his daughter Elisabeth was born.
From 1951 to 1966, he was professor at the Istanbul Technical University, at the department of architecture. 1955, he got the Federal Cross of Merit. He was called back to the Academy in Berlin West only in 1956, the same year the works which stayed in New York could be received back with the help of the Foreign Office.
At the age of eighty, he decided to return to Germany again, where he lived in Krailling, near Munich. He died in Munich in June 1972, being highly decorated by the German government with the Federal Cross of Merit with Star.
The archive is meanwhile managed by his daughter Elisabeth Weber-Belling.