George Minne

George Minne (1866-1941) is often given a place in the artists' colony of Sint-Martens-Latem in Belgium, but has his cradle in the previous period in Ghent and Brussels. He then played an important role in European Symbolism. Minne's images have an enormous expression of emotion, fear, vulnerability and weakness. Poets and contemporaries were especially impressed by his tragedy. Grégoire Le Roy described Minne as a sculptor-poête.

Kneeling Youth
As Sculpture Gallery Het Depot, we are not collectors or a museum that wants to complete its collection. That will remain the case, but we have one permanent collection: that of Eja Siepman van den Berg. A collection that now includes 40 images. To put this in a certain perspective, we have added images to the collection of a number of sculptors from earlier times. One of these is the sculpture Kneeling Youth (1925) by George Minne.

Study and work
He studied at the Ghent academy from 1879 to 1886. His first works, which have disappeared, were in the tradition of decorative, monumental art as taught by his teachers Théodore Canneel and Louis Van Biesbroeck. However, when he exhibited in Ghent in 1889 and in Brussels in 1890, he appeared to have developed a completely different idiom. They were grieving father and mother figures and dejected youth figures. The reviews were generally not very positive, although the artist collective Les Vingt recognized the innovative power of his images. Minne joined this group and clearly distanced himself from the traditional sculpture of the time, which he also considered the work of Rodin to include. By the way, Minne had applied to Roden as a practitioner a few years earlier, but he had been rejected by the master.

His later work is generally best known because it is widely distributed and often also has a public function. However, it is oriented completely differently from the work from his first and best period. This is clearly noticeable when one compares the revivals of earlier images, for example the kneeling young people, with the original versions. The best-known example of such a late revival is the Fountain of the Kneeling on the Emile Braunplein in Ghent. This well-known work was created in the 1930s and is fundamentally different from the original fountain. With his later images, Minne belongs more to the relaxed and decorative classicism of the interwar period, rather than to the symbolism of before 1900.