George Minne Lot n° 113

George Minne Model for the monument by Georges Rodenbach 1902 Plaster. 47 x 83 x 28.7 cm. Unmarked. - Tinted light gray with cast seams and workshop marks. The front left corner of the plinth has been attached several times. Rossi-Schrimpf P 30A Provenance Thomas Braun, Brussels; Paul Eeckhout, Ghent; Brockstedt Gallery, Hamburg, 1984; private collection, Hesse Exhibitions Cf. Ghent 1982 (Museum voor Schone Kunsten), George Minne en de kunst rond 1900, no. 104a (marble version) Literature André de Ridder, George Minne, Antwerp 1947, no. 16 (marble version); Inga Rossi-Schrimpf, George Minne. Das Frühwerk und seine Rezeption in Deutschland und Österreich bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg, Weimar 2012, p. 199, ill. 99 Towards the end of the 19th century, the Belgian sculptor and draughtsman George Minne was - alongside Auguste Rodin and Aristide Maillol - the most important representative of modernist sculpture. He achieved international fame with portrait busts of representatives of the Belgian royal family and, above all, with the "Young Man's Fountain" for Karl Ernst Osthaus's Folkwang Museum in Hagen, completed in 1906. In 1899/1900 he was commissioned by Emil Verhaeren, Max Elskamp and the "Société des Artistes et Ecrivains francais" to create a monument to the Belgian poet and writer Georges Rodenbach (1855-1898). After initially working as a lawyer, which he did purely for a living, Rodenbach later concentrated entirely on writing poems, novels and stories for the stage. His best-known work, "The Dead Bruges", was published in 1892. Even though his book tells of a dying city, it paradoxically helped Bruges to a new lease of life with economic recovery, brisk building activity and a first-time influx of tourists. Verhaeren's commissioning committee therefore planned to place the monument in a prominent location in Bruges. However, the city refused. It was only after several years of negotiations that the city council of neighboring Ghent was prepared to unveil the 140 cm high marble monument on the St. Elisabethbegijnhof. The model offered is the only surviving plaster design that Minne was able to successfully present to the "Société des Artistes et Ecrivains francais". In memory of the poet, he had designed a woman wrapped in a long robe and leaning her head in mourning in her right hand in the spirit of his 'expressive sculpture'. According to a letter from the director of the Musée des Beaux-Arts Ghent, Paul Eeckhout, the design came directly from the sculptor Minne.