Kneeling Youth
Plaster version of a fountain figure for the Folkwang Museum in Hagen

George Minne is con sidered one of the major Symbolist sculptors in Belgium around 1900. Since the 1890s Minne had explored the gaunt figure of a boy with a Gothic elongation of the limbs.
Minne’s most famous sculpture is the “Kneeling Youth”. For Karl Ernst Osthaus’s new museum in Hagen a fountain with five identical kneeling youths is being created as a prominent centerpiece for the entrance hall. Minne used the kneeling youth motif not only as a fountain figure, but as grave monument and as a decorative sculpture on its own. That marks Minne’s radical breakaway from the notion of the function of a sculpture in favor of a new openness. The artist created a new human iconography that makes him a forerunner of modernism.