Kneeling youth

Galerie Reinke, Berlin

With his sculpture The Kneeling Youth of the Fountain from 1898, George Minne created one of the most poignant and iconic sculptures of symbolism in Belgium and far beyond. The modest, kneeling youth – naked, slender, head bowed, arms folded across his chest – embodies an intense inner emotional life. The work is not a classical heroic nude figure, but a tranquil expression of introspection, vulnerability and existential loneliness.

The design of this sculpture is part of a series of five identical kneeling youths that together form The Fountain of the Kneeling. However, each of these sculptures was also created as an autonomous work of art and has been dispersed among various museum collections, including:
Musée d'Orsay (Paris, France)
Museum Folkwang (Essen, Germany)
Neue Nationalgalerie (Berlin, Germany)
Kröller-Müller Museum (Otterlo, Netherlands)
Museum of Fine Arts Ghent (Belgium)

Minne's interpretations of the Kneeling Youth had a profound influence on his contemporaries and later artists. The emphasis on inner experience, the ascetic body and spiritual intensity resonate with the visual language of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele in Austria, and with the mysticism of Rodin and Meunier in France and Belgium. In contrast to Rodin's powerful dynamism, Minne opts for tranquillity and emotional intensity, elevating symbolism to a pure and sober visual language.

George Minne, a key figure in the First Group of the “Latem School” and closely associated with the writers of "La Jeune Belgique" and "Van Nu en Straks", sought pure, inner beauty in his work. The Kneeling Youth of the Fountain marks the beginning of modern introspective sculpture and is rightly considered his masterpiece.

This sculpture embodies the transition from the nineteenth-century academic tradition to a more modern expression in which the psychological dimension takes centre stage. The young man turns away from the world and inward – a universal human gesture that continues to resonate today.

Similar item in the collection:
MoMa, New York, object no. 232.1962 (plaster)
Museum Van Buuren, Brussels (bronze)
Musée d'Orsay, Parijs, inv. RF 3256 (bronze)
Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo, inv. KM 125.732 (bronze)
Kunsthalle, Hamburg, inv. S-1980-5 (marble)
Museum Boymans-Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, inv. BEK 1292 (MK) (marble)
Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts, Vienna (marble)
Clemens-Sels Museum, Neuss (Germany), inv. 1964PI017 (plaster)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, inv. 2011.10 (plaster)
Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Gent, inv. 86874/ cat. 5 (bronze)

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