After the artist Egon Altdorf died in 2008, a friend of his called Altdorf’s son, Dorian Crone, to tell him that his father’s studio was being demolished. “I rushed over to the studio in Wiesbaden,” Crone told the Art Newspaper, “and I saw rolls of paper there that looked like artwork, and I managed to save them.” Though his sculptures are magnificent, Altdorf was never well known. A practicing Catholic, he rejected commercial art circles and lived reclusively. Altdorf was born in Trzebiatów, Poland, in 1922, but the family moved and he grew up in Berlin. Drafted into the German army in 1941, he was taken prisoner in Tunisia, and then interned in Texas. When Altdorf returned to Germany, he moved to Wiesbaden (his parents and old home were lost in the war), and began studying sculpture with Emy Roeder. In 1952, he won a prize in a competition to design the Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner, and in 1953 he was chosen to create a monument for a synagogue ravaged during Kristallnacht. The Henry Moore Institute is featuring three of Altdorf’s steel sculptures, as well as a series of his marvelous woodcuts and prints. —Elena Clavarino