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A work by Marcel Janco, the Rumanian-born artist, one of the founders of the Dadaist (anti-artists) movement, and a contemporary of Pablo Picasso, is the top lot in Bonhams Israeli Art & Judaica in London on May 24th.

The painting titled ‘Marseille Port’, 1933, an oil on canvas, 100 x 133cm (39 3/8 x 52 3/8in), is estimated to sell for £120,000-180,000.

Born in Romania in 1895, Janko was among the principal founders of the Dada Movement which was opposed to war, aggression and the changing world culture.
Dadaist events included poetry, avant-garde music, and mask wearing dancers in elaborate shows, teasing the audience. These artists set out to defy Western culture and art, which they considered obsolete in view of the carnage of World War I.

Janco has an eclectic style which brilliantly combines abstract and figurative elements, expressionistic in nature. In 1941 he moved to the land, which was to become the nation of Israel in 1948. Here he painted idyllic watercolour and oil images and was captivated by the exotic sights of the Orient.

In 1953 Janco established the artists’ village known as Ein Hod, which now boasts the Janco Dada Museum. In 1967 he was awarded the Israel Prize for Painting. In the last years of his life he worked together with friends to erect the Janco Dada Museum, dying just ten months after the inauguration of the museum in 1984.

Another Israeli artistic luminary, Israel Hershberg, is also featured in this sale. Hershberg was born on November 7, 1948 in a Displaced Persons camp in Linz, Austria. In 1949, he emigrated to Israel and lived there until he was nine. In 1958, he immigrated to the United States where he attended the Brooklyn Museum School, Brooklyn, New York from 1966 to 1968.

In 1972, he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York. In 1973, he received his Master of Fine Arts, State University of New York, Albany, New York. From 1973 to 1984 he was instructor of painting and drawing at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, Maryland. In 1984, he taught painting at the New York Academy of Art, New York, New York.

Israel Hershberg moved back to Israel with his wife and family in 1984. In 1991, he was awarded the Sandberg Prize for Israel Art and in 1998 the Tel Aviv Museum of Art Prize for Israel Art. The artist is the founder and director of the Jerusalem Studio School, and lives and works in Jerusalem, Israel.

His oil on canvas, Jerusalem, City Centre, 1989-90 is estimated to sell for £100,000-150,000

Other artists and works featured in this initial sale include:

Ori Reisman (Israeli, 1924-1991)
Landscape, 1980s
signed
oil on canvas
66 x 78cm (26 x 30 11/16in).

£40,000-60,000

Jakob Steinhardt (Israeli, 1887-1968)

Jerusalem, View from the East, 1941
signed and dated
oil on canvas
101 x 153cm (39 3/4 x 60 1/4in).

£20,000-30,000

For more informations : ?http://www.bonhams.com/eur/israeliart

Onze statuettes, qualifiées par les nazis «d’exemples de la décadence juive et bolchévique», ont été découvertes dans les gravats d’un immeuble berlinois bombardé. Elles sont exposées à partir de mardi 11/09/2010 au musée archéologique de Berlin.

 Emy Roeder, femme enceinte - C’est un «miracle et un triomphe posthume sur les nazis»s’émeut le maire de Berlin, Klaus Wowereit. Après 70 ans passés sous terre, onze statuettes, disparues dans la tourmente des années 30, sont exposées à partir de mardi 9 novembre au musée archéologique de Berlin. Ces œuvres, classées par les nazis comme «art dégénéré», ont été découvertes entre janvier et octobre 2010 dans les gravats d’un immeuble berlinois, bombardé lors de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. On les considérait jusque là perdues. Les statuettes en bronze et en terre cuite, exemples «d’art décadent juif ou bolchevique», avaient été confisquées et interdites sous le IIIe Reich.

Edwin Scharff, portrait de l’actrice Anni Mewes – Ces statuettes ont été trouvées près de l’hôtel de ville où des fouilles sont menées sur le tronçon de la future ligne de métro. Un ouvrier a déniché par hasard une première œuvre en bronze alors qu’un bulldozer dégageait des gravats d’anciennes caves d’un immeuble bombardé en 1944. “Nous travaillions pour trouver des restes d’une ancienne mairie du XIIIe siècle et sommes tombés sur du soi-disant “art dégénéré” du XXe siècle. C’était une surprise”, s’émerveille encore le directeur du musée de préhistoire et d’antiquité.

Marg Moll, une danseuse - Les statuettes proviennent probablement des étages supérieurs de l’immeuble qui s’est effondré après avoir brûlé. Quatre ont figuré dans une grande exposition, intitulée “l’art dégénéré”, que les nazis ont présentée dans plusieurs villes en 1937 et 1938. Deux autres œuvres sont aussi apparues dans un film de propagande en 1941. Les archéologues pensent que les œuvres ont été récupérées par Erhard Oewerdieck, un inspecteur des impôts et agent fiduciaire, qui a aidé des Juifs à fuir l’Allemagne nazie. Oewerdieck, qui a été honoré à ce titre par le musée de l’Holocauste de Yad Vashem en Israël, disposait d’un bureau dans les étages de l’immeuble détruit.

Tête d’Otto Freundlich – Huit de ces onze petites sculptures ont été identifiées à partir d’anciennes photos d’œuvres bannies. Il s’agit de productions d’Otto Baum, d’Otto Freundlich, de Karl Knappe, de Marg Moll, d’Emy Roeder, d’Edwin Scharff, de Gustav Heinrich Wolff, et de Naum Slutzky. Seuls deux de ces artistes étaient effectivement juifs. Freundlich n’a pas survécu à sa déportation au camp de concentration de Majdanek en Pologne et Slutzky est mort en exil en Angleterre.

Otto Braun, femme debout - Les nazis attribuait le qualificatif d’ «art dégénéré» arbitrairement : il suffisait que les œuvres représentent des personnages trop modernes, gras, maigres ou au nez trop épais. Parfois, elles avaient simplement le tort d’avoir été vendues par des galeristes juifs. En tout, 20.000 objets ont été confisqués dans plus de 100 musées allemands. Certains de ces objets ont ensuite été vendus à l’étranger pour obtenir des devises, et nombre d’autres détruits ou perdus.

Buste de femme de Naum Slutzky (1er plan), deux sculptures une anonyme et une de Gustav Wolff (2e plan )- Reste à savoir à qui appartiennent les statuettes. Pour le maire de Berlin, ce n’est pas la priorité. «Nous devrions simplement être heureux d’avoir retrouvé ces objets, la question de leur propriété est relativement peu importante”. Selon les experts, les oeuvres pourraient éventuellement être rendues aux musées où elles ont été dérobées. La plupart d’entre elles ont été endommagées, notamment par le feu. Mais elles ne seront pas restaurées afin de garder les traces de leur destin exceptionnel et tragique.

Par Constance Jamet LE FIGARO

Yigal Ozeri  is an Israeli painter that lives and works for the last twenty years in New York. Inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites // artists from nineteenth century England who went out into nature and celebrated it // he has managed with his cinematic portraits to challenge perception and illusion. His latest exhibition at Mike Weiss Gallery in New York is called Desire for Anima, as a tribute to Carl Jung’s concept of the unconscious or true inner self of an individual. His models, at the transitional age between youth and maturity, are vulnerable and at the same time real in an almost dreamlike way. Lost in nature, they come in touch with a part of ourselves that many of us tend to forget.

Some might say that Ozeri’s work is romantic. But it’s a romanticism that hides inside tones of sensuality, like a celebration of the untouchable. And like any celebration of the untouchable, in its core is a celebration of the ideal. In this case it’s naked bodies in a place where they naturally belong, unselfconsciously posing, inviting you to feel their easiness and freedom. It comes of no surprise that Ozeri doesn’t work with professional models. He uses real people and he lets them just be in their natural environment: using a big lens from somewhere near, he captures the spontaneous. Ozeri may be hidden in a safe place and he may keep a certain distance from his models, but it is exactly this distance that lets him intimate, get into the core. He uses fantasy to connect with reality. Those shots are the first step; he then uses Photoshop and sometimes changes the light or the colors, he prints them in large dimensions and does the drawings on paper. In a kind of a renaissance teacher-student relationship, Ozeri works with a big crew that is present in all the phases of the project and is to blame as well for challenging our senses.

The final result is an amalgam of multiple layers that achieve to transmit such a big amount of details that you can even sense the breath of the portrayed girls. Ozeri says that in a world of violence, romanticism and freedom are the answer. Either as a reminding of the beautiful and the ideal or as an effective antidote to everyday harshness, his portraits have a power that disarms the viewer with a smile and makes him want to get lost in a parallel world. Safe from harm, sensuality blooms.

And we simply can’t take our eyes off of them…

Yigal Ozeri has exhibited extensively throughout Israel, Europe and the United States, and his work can be found in many prominent collections, including Albertina Museum, Vienna; Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Westchester; Kennedy Center for the Arts, Washington DC; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio; Nerman Museum, Kansas City; Scheringa Museum of Realist Art, Netherlands; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel; and The Jewish Museum, New York.

 Robert Ayers in conversation with Yigal Ozeri.

Yigal, let’s get straight to the heart of this: you’re a middle-aged married man, and for several years now you’ve been painting pictures of attractive young women, in lush natural settings, and often naked or semi-naked. Who are they?

Something like six years ago when I first decided I wanted to work with models, I put something on craigslist. Girls showed up who’d posed for magazines, and they looked like something out of Penthouse. There was no one that interested me. But by chance I’d also advertized for a man with long hair. This one guy showed up, a very interesting guy, and in conversation he said, “I have a girlfriend, but the problem is that she lives in the forest in Maine.” I didn’t believe him, but the next week we went and we met this girl – her name is Priscilla – in Maine.  So that’s how it started.

And what was it that Priscilla had that those other models hadn’t?

Priscilla is the real thing. She’s not a model that I took into nature. She’s a person who lives in nature, and all her food comes from nature. I didn’t believe that they still existed, but there are people who live like that. A new generation who live like the hippies did in the sixties and seventies.

Was Yigal Ozeri a hippie, back in the day?

I could not fulfill that dream back then. I was in Israel, just reading about it in the paper. But for me this is a way to see that life again, to live that life again. So I was looking for that kind of person, that kind of girl. They have no home, they’re not thinking about money, they’re not thinking about what they’re going to do tomorrow. And I found Priscilla.

And how did you meet the young women in these new paintings?

I met a designer, a Hassidic Jew who left the Hassidic community and became one of a group of people who live like hippies: people who live in a different house every day, and don’t even know what they’re going to do the next day. They are not beggars, they are not homeless, but they don’t have a salary and they do their own thing. I was fascinated. And this guy introduced me to these two girls, Jessica and Jana.

Jessica came from one place, and Jana came from another place, but they became friends. I tried to get to know them, and to understand them, so we spent a long time together before I photographed them – I went with them to clubs, and we went out into nature together. I did the same things that they do together. This new generation is fascinating.

And when you did photograph them, it was out in this meadow. Why was that?

I am fascinated by the Pre-Raphaelites – artists from nineteenth century England who went out into nature and celebrated nature. So I took Jana and Jessica to the home a couple of my collectors in New Jersey, where they have a beautiful, endless wheat field near their home. I could do a complete celebration in nature there.

What did you tell them to do?

I hardly said anything. I never direct anybody.  I never directed Priscilla. I said, “OK, I’ll take the camera and I’ll let you do whatever you want,” and that’s how we did it. It was very playful. They did what they wanted, what they felt, and it was great. I used a long lens from far away and took thousands of photographs.

Then what happens? You select an image from those thousands?

Yes, then I work with it digitally on the computer. In Photoshop. Sometimes I change the light, or I change the colors. Then I print a big photograph. I do a drawing on paper from that, and then I paint. Every part gets the same amount of attention, the same focus. Look at the skin, and the degree of detail. There are maybe twenty or thirty layers there. People ask me, “Why paper?” Well, when you touch canvas the surface rejects you, but when you touch paper the surface sucks you in. It lets you work. It’s very friendly.

You work with assistants, don’t you?

Yes, ten painting assistants, and another five working on the video and photography. It’s a whole crew. They’re assistants who work like they did in the renaissance. . Van Eyck, or Velasquez, or Leonardo, or Rubens, they all worked with assistants. They were directors. I believe in that. Go to the Metropolitan Museum. The best piece there is that van Eyck where he used twenty-five assistants. And it’s the best piece there because every one of them gave their best.

The best artist you can find will work ten hours a day for six days a week. That’s sixty hours. We are talking about 600 hours a week. What one person can do in a year, we can do in a month. This whole show took a year and a half.

My system is that they work for me ten hours a day, three days a week, and the rest of the time they do their own art. They’re not slaves. I’m not like Jeff Koons. And they don’t work for me for more than three years. They go on to do their own art and I take on new people. It’s like an education.

Let me just be certain about this. Does your brush touch every part of the picture?

I touch every single part in every piece. I’m like a conductor who works with the different elements. The assistants do the drawing and they start putting in a lot of layers. It’s very fast. Then I start to get involved in a big way with the highlights. I have help, but only one person works with me on the highest detail. I do most of the main stuff – the hair, the face – but you need a lot of people otherwise you don’t finish. Filmmakers have a lot of people working with them. Some do the costumes, some do the scenery, and they’re brilliant artists. In the end, a lot of people are involved in a great piece of art.

Can we go back to the Photoshop stage? Will you sometimes combine different elements from two different photographs?

No, and this is very unusual. If you take one of today’s figurative painters – let’s say Lisa Yuskavage or Marilyn Minter or John Currin. Everybody says they are the most important contemporary artists, but they are very academic. John Currin uses art history and makes a collage: he takes a shot of his wife and he takes a body from Cranach and he puts them together and he has a painting. I’m not saying anything against that. He’s a brilliant painter. But what I do is completely different because I disconnect myself from art history. I worked with it for many years, but what I do now is push through to real life. I am dealing with reality. I think that I am one of the only artists who does that, and this is the kind of stuff that people don’t understand.

Well, explain what you mean by reality.

This is reality. You cannot get that if you go to the studio and manipulate what you have. I don’t manipulate. I take reality as it is.  In my paintings you feel the moment, the smell, the breath. Like this painting of Megan: I spent a long time with Megan. She’s not a model. She’s just a regular person, a regular girl who goes to fashion school. I took her to Central Park, and I told her, “We’ll find the location, but I’m disappearing, and you do whatever you want.” She chose her clothes, and she brought her stuff and made a picnic – sitting down, lying down, doing whatever she wanted the whole day, and I was shooting from so far away with a big lens that she didn’t see me. I really let her do whatever she wanted. And this is what I’ve achieved: I can get inside people’s lives.

So, you’re saying there’s no sexual dimension to these pictures?

In its final results I don’t feel that my work is about sexuality. It’s about joy. I think that two naked women in a big field of wheat is the most complete connection with nature. It’s completely about freedom. It’s completely about celebration.

But people often talk about these young women as your “muses”. That word often has a sexual implication.

Maybe, but I don’t have that sort of relationship with them. You have to be like a shadow that goes with them. But you cannot have a relationship with them. It’s hard. I’m a married man, I have kids, and I love my wife and I love my family. It’s tempting. But you can’t have them falling in love with you. You have to be very careful. It’s a decision that I’ve made.

But surely they are your friends?

They’re really good friends. They introduce me to all their friends and their family. If they need anything they can call me. When you do something that is so intimate with people, you have to be part of their life.

You try to get into their head, but without interfering.

Tell me why you’ve borrowed Carl Jung’s word “anima” in the title of this show.

When people tell you over many years that you are a certain way, it probably means that you are that way. People have said for years that the point of view that comes out of my work is that it’s like a woman painted it. That’s a big compliment in my opinion, and I’ll tell you why. It’s like I come to these girls not like a man with his sexual gaze but as a part of their heads.  Like Carl Jung said, there’s a part of a woman in the head of a man. That’s the achievement here. I really think that it’s happened, after the six or seven years that I’ve been dealing with this subject. That’s what’s unique – I’m not like most painters who have a dialogue or a friendship or a relationship with a model. It’s not like Andrew Wyeth. It doesn’t work like that. It’s work with a different point of view. That’s what I meant about reality.

Some people might call that romantic, rather than realistic.

I’m not afraid of the word romanticism. This is what I bring back to painting, and what I bring back to the art world. The art world is so full of violence, of death, of disgusting stuff, and I bring romanticism, the back to things. Or really I don’t bring it back – I show it in people who are living today and want it like that. To show people living in nature without malice, people who need nothing besides love, is more radical than going taking photographs in Iraq. With all the things that are happening in the world today, all the violence, all the sex, I take things to the opposite place, to the most freedom , and to the celebration of nature. And there’s a lot of this new generation who choose to live like that.

Look what’s happening in architecture. Look what’s happening in film, and in fashion. Everybody’s moving to the next generation. We have to move to a different place. We cannot stay still any more. How many times can you use illustration? How many times can you use comics? How many times can you use American pop? It’s been done. You have to move to a new place, to real life.

From A Sky filled with Shooting Stars, Robert Ayers in New York City (http://www.askyfilledwithshootingstars.com)

The story so far. In 1997, at the Royal Academy, the sensation of Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection is neither Damien Hirst’s increasingly dowdy, dilapidated, dog-eared shark, nor the homeopathically talented Tracey Emin, whose empty appliquéd tent is an exact objective correlative of her camp conceptualism. Nor is it yet Marcus Harvey’s cool, ironic but cynically hyped portrait of Myra Hindley, whose compositional method is denounced by the tabloids – because the face is an agglomeration of childish handprints. Nor is the sensation of Sensation the Jake and Dinos Chapman 1995 fibreglass frieze of girls – naked, prepubescent, wearing only trainers, but sporting several penile noses and open, anal mouths.

Among this clamorous, attention-seeking art there is good work – by Jenny Saville, Rachel Whiteread, and the photographer Richard Billingham. And there, on the floor, 3ft long, is one indisputable, obvious masterpiece – a single work, the understated Dead Dad by Ron Mueck, the Australian son-in-law of Paula Rego – a calmly brilliant sculpture which is the contemporary equivalent of, say, Holbein’s subtle portrait of Erasmus, with its engaged intelligence and wryly amused thin mouth.

The greatness of Dead Dad is oxymoronic: its very completeness also tells us something is missing. The sculpture dispassionately records every delicate and indelicate bodily detail – detail that is alive with accuracy. Nothing is missing. Tendons, toenails, the direction of dark hair on the calves, the hazy pubes a little stationary mirage, the tidy greying hair, the polished, modest, uncircumcised cosh of the penis at four o’clock, which echoes the thumbs across the open, upturned palms.

And yet this body is unmistakably dead. It is laid out – the opposite of foetal. We are not in the presence of sleep. The eyes have it – significantly pink, fatally, infinitesimally sunken. And the helpless hands have irretrievably lost it.

Everything is there still, but stilled, and something central has gone. The reduction in scale somehow suggests this loss. The body is lesser than life – for some, lighter by 21 grams, the weight of the soul: the alleged difference in body weight before and after death.

I talked to Ron Mueck in October 2000, when he was artist in residence at the National Gallery, and we discussed Dead Dad. He was worried about sentimentality: “I didn’t really get on with my father but, as I made the piece, I found myself thinking about him, caring.” The carefulness of his creation is cognate with care in the broader sense. In fact, sentimentality is nowhere in sight. Though there is sentiment – a completely other thing – it is inextricably fused with another perfectly proper, strong human emotion: curiosity.

Mueck also said that in creating Dead Dad he had worked from memory and imagination. Imagination. In the Lucian Freud retrospective at Tate Britain in 2002, no 113, The Painter’s Mother Dead 1989, was a drawing done from “life”, in the immediate aftermath of death. It records unsparingly the palsied skew death inflicts on the mouth. Karl Kraus said that a portrait was a picture in which the mouth was wrong. In death, all the mouths are wrong. The rictus is an oddly painful, unexpected, ugly fact. The undertaker and about 12 hours restore malleability and undo the damage. You have to be at a deathbed to know this. Mueck wasn’t – and so couldn’t be expected to know and record this expression of fleeting melodrama. Dead Dad isn’t harmed by this omission.

In fact, on balance, the sculpture perhaps benefits – because Mueck’s art is characteristically understated. Not for him the swastikas and hypodermics of, say, Bacon’s painterly histrionics. His preferred reference work is Professor R D Lockhart’s Living Anatomy (“A Photographic Atlas of Muscles in Action and Surface Contours”). This dislike of emotional grand guignol, of grandstanding exhibitionism, is at once typically Australian and classically modernist. Natural taciturnity meets principled artistic restraint. The modernist enquiry into the emotions is predicated on a shared scepticism about the purity and force of what we feel – Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence, Conrad, Camus, all know that we frequently feel less than we are supposed to feel. Or feel it differently. Or adulterated with “inappropriate” feelings. The modernists know, too, that in literature real but unspectacular emotions – like embarrassment, curiosity – are often ousted by super-sized emotional simplifications.

In the new Edinburgh exhibition, there is a piece called Spooning Couple: two tiny figures, a man in a T-shirt and a woman in a pair of knickers, cuddle up to each other like spoons, both facing in the same direction. They are bigger than a pair of spoons, more like Brobdingnagian salad servers. One’s initial assumption is of cosiness and affection. There isn’t any obvious antagonism of the kind recorded in Paul Muldoon’s poem Asra, where a couple “wake before dawn; back to back: duellists”.

And yet … all is not well. They are not as comfortable, as relaxed, as they seem at first. Both sets of eyes are open – without eye contact. They are thinking. In silence. About what? We can only guess. Her unclothed torso is turned away from his clothed torso. His naked lower half is against her knickers. The T-shirt is unironed, its white muted. The knickers are somehow indeterminate – the faded colour purple that results when whites get washed with items which aren’t colourfast. Romantic it isn’t.

Vladimir Nabokov once asked his protégé, Alfred Appel, how academe was weathering a period of widespread student unrest in the 1960s. Appel reported that things at his university were quiet: a nun had complained that couples were “spooning” at the back of lectures. Nabokov pounced: “You should have told her to thank God they weren’t forking.”

Mueck’s Spooning Couple are definitely not forking. They seem not to be spooning either, in the erotic sense – they resemble kitchen utensils in close proximity, more than they resemble human beings about to make love. Mueck has given us the habit of affection, the pose of cuddling. In Dead Dad, he gave us the mystery of death – of to be and not to be. In Spooning Couple, he has given us another mystery – the precise moment of sexual evaporation. The emotion here is as miniaturised as the figures – mild worry, “How did we get here, if this is where we are?”

Mueck has now created, by my rough calculation, about 35 pieces in nine years. There are no failures. (He spoke in 2000 about the pressure of success: “You have to keep on doing something better. Reviews stop you working for two years.”) Only one piece is actual size – a dog: “The only lifesize thing I’ve ever done.” I saw the photograph, not the sculpture: the dog was prognathous, either naturally, or as a display of aggression. It had a tiny, volcanic, red, pointed semi hard-on. The others, whether scaled up or scaled down, are equally painstaking.

And, in every case, the emotion is as accurate as the physical detail. Ghost, an early piece on show at Edinburgh, is a wonderful, unexaggerated sculpture depicting an emotion rarely noted by artists – self-consciousness. A gigantified girl in an unflattering swimming costume arranges herself awkwardly – as if she were a tripod rather than a biped – caught between two states, at once pathologically ordinary and a freakish refugee from Diane Arbus’s lurid, unforgiving, prying lens. Her size, the scale, is how she feels about her body. Technically, this cognitive dissonance is called anosognosia – which means not being aware of your condition. She thinks she is the Incredible Hulk. She is only sick with shyness.

Art historians tend to source Mueck’s art in the art of the past – particularly since his residence at the National Gallery – either in dialogue or in debt. The absence of originality is seen in some strange way as a guarantee of worth – and a vindication, therefore, of the art historian’s role. Hmm. Mueck’s sculptures are meticulously “copied”, meticulously imagined and meticulously composed – like all the greatest art of the past. They share these demanding fundamentals. But that is all. Take, for instance, Rogier van der Weyden’s Deposition in the Mauritshuis in The Hague. Two things immediately strike me. The blood from the wound in Christ’s side runs down, disappears under his loincloth, and continues down his leg. Imagination. The man holding Christ under his arms has folded back his fur sleeves, so he isn’t hampered, or soiled. Imagination. The right sleeve nearest to the viewer is painted so that we can see the open fur at the fold, which is like a wound. That visual echo is deliberate artistry.

Now consider a piece from 1998, Man with Shaved Head. It frequently provokes in critics a “comparison” with the Kritian Boy from the Acropolis (c.480BC). You might equally summon up The Dying Gaul (c.230BC) from the Capitoline Museum in Rome. Neither is properly pertinent. For a start, they both have hair, and it is crucial to Mueck’s sculpture that his young man is bald. Why? Because the compositional axis of his sculpture is a parallel – between the circumcised head and shaft of his penis, and the neck and shaved head. Both bulbous paralleled spheres are themselves between two parallels – the cock is between the ankles (he is squatting), the skin-head is between extended arms.

Echoes. Parallels. In Man with Shaved Head, the very idea of parallels is suggested by the man’s parallel feet and the parallel arms. Naturally, this is part of Mueck’s sculptural stock-in-trade. He spends, he told me, a lot of time staring at his clay models – trying to see them. “If you’ve been looking at a piece of clay for hours you can’t see it.” He has invented strategies to counter this blasé blindness: he takes photographs; he looks at the piece in a mirror; he glances over his shoulder. In one case, Big Man (2000), he lost his rag, bashed it on the head, and created a frown from which the sculpture really began. Look for long enough and parallels – natural parallels – will mob the real artist.

For example, the cover of the National Gallery catalogue is a photograph of Mueck’s tool board – pliers, pincers, punches, wire-cutters, all suspended from Phillips screws, handles dangling like legs, outlined in crayon on the plywood. There is also an outlined Mueck sculpture of a small baby – its legs an obvious parallel, but an ironic parallel, because its vulnerability also insists on dissimilitude.

Another example, Pregnant Woman (2002), demonstrates lucidly how the face and the body can be mirror images of each other. All portrait painters know – if they are any good – that the face is echoic, a rhyming dictionary. The eyes and the nostrils and the eyebrows are examples of almost competitive mimicry. Raise an eyebrow, arch a nostril – snap. In Matisse’s 1914 drawing of Elsa Glaser, the mouth is another eye. In Mueck’s Pregnant Woman, this network of parallels is extended to an invisible omnipresence.

First things first. You are overwhelmed by the size of the piece. She is larger than life – 8ft tall. But pregnant women at this stage are larger than life. There is, too, something unbelievable, impossible even, about their anatomy. Mueck reminds us of more familiar truths as well. The woman has monumental legs and feet. We think of women as feminine, delicate, waisted. And they are. But they are also female, sturdy and monumental. Pregnancy reveals the practicality of the pelvis, like the frame of a rucksack.

Then you are overwhelmed by the detail. Amazingly. The danger of scaling things up, of bigging it, is that there isn’t enough detail to go round the acres of extra space, of dead space. Her calves and shins are shaved. There are two very inconspicuous spots on her bum – in exactly the right place. The spot on her left buttock is just to the left of her bum crack. The moles are perfect, especially the larger one just above her left armpit.

Then the parallels kick in: the closed rounded eyelids are mini-breasts, the nose a pregnant belly (with a mole placed to echo the bud of the navel). The lips and vagina are an obvious implicit parallel, of course. Her hair parallels her pubic hair – both wonderfully accurate, differentiated textures. Her arms mirror her legs, her hands mirror her feet.

Her look is one of exhausted, weary concentration. Her eyes are closed. The sculpture is a portrait of fatigue. This is typical of these unsentimental sculptures. Mother and Child shows a mother who has just given birth. The baby’s colour is deeper, darker, shiny as brawn, say, turned out of a butcher’s mould. Its umbilicus vanishes up the vagina. The vagina is echoed by the baby’s buttocks and feet, from which the other end of the umbilicus protrudes. The woman’s facial expression is neutral, bled of melodrama. Just looking, in Updike’s phrase. There is no obvious joy, no tears. She is unsmiling. But the real triumph is the woman’s hair – uncombed to exactly the right degree.

I said there were no failures. Perhaps there are – on the studio floor, in the rubbish bins. But I will enter a tiny caveat: some of the larger-than-lifesize masks run the risk of caricature. There are two in the Edinburgh exhibition: one a self-portrait of Mueck sleeping (Mask II, 2001-02), the other a black woman’s plump face (Mask III, 2005). Of these two, the self-portrait runs the greatest risk, as did the original frowning self-portrait (Mask, 1997), which Mueck explained away by saying it was how he imagined he appeared to his children. Still, we are dealing with greatness here – no question.

Craig Raine , The Guardian, 12 August 2006