Hermione Goossens

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Hermine (Minnie) Goossens (born July 21, 1878 in Aachen , † February 8, 1968 in Attel ) was a German sculptor and ceramicist .

Live and act

Hermine Goossens, generally known as "Minnie Goossens", came from a family of manufacturers based in Aachen and was either the sister or cousin of Josse Goossens , painter and later professor at the Munich Art Academy . After attending St. Leonhard's secondary school for girls in Aachen, Hermine Goossens moved to Munich around 1900 , where she hoped for better opportunities to study art. It has not been conclusively proven, but several sources indicate that she made contact there with the Women's Academy in Munich and later with the Debschitz School to study sculpture and modeling.

In the context of the Debschitz School, Goossens met the artist Johanna Biehler (1880–1954), with whom they founded their own majolica factory in Nymphenburg in 1903 , both of which equipped them with a large kiln for firing temperatures of over 1000 degrees. These were the years in which Munich, among others , had developed into a center of Art Nouveau in art, which the artist couple Biehler / Goossens also joined with the design of their works. While Goossens concentrated on the design, modeling and sculptural design of the majolica works and large medallions , Biehler mainly took over the production technology and the artistic color design, experimenting in particular with the hot-fire colors and producing and testing new mixtures and glazes .

The artist couple Goossens / Biehler quickly became known and appreciated in the art scene, and their reliefs , tiles and medallions were used by numerous builders and architects in private villas and representative buildings as decorative objects for facade, portal, staircase and wall design. It was important to them to only create unique items that were only produced in their ceramic workshop and consequently turned down several takeover offers from factories that wanted to manufacture their objects in industrial series production.

After the German Werkbund had been founded in 1907 and the trend from Art Nouveau to New Objectivity had gradually taken place, Goossens and Biehler adapted their works of art to this new art direction. Among other things, this led to the fact that as early as 1912 they were commissioned to design two monumental portals in blue ceramic for the "House of Women" for the Cologne Werkbund exhibition in 1914 and to submit designs for a contemporary majolica frieze with motifs on the role of women.

Marian column with a statue of the Madonna by Hermine Goossens in Munich's Westfriedhof

Already during the First World War the orders of the artist workshop Goossen / Biehler steadily decreased, and therefore the artists decided after the war to close the studio and move to the country. In the vicinity of Schliersee , where Hermine Goossens' brother or cousin Jesse Goossens ran a painting studio, they settled down and built a new workshop for Christian art , from now on focusing on wood carving . During the Second World War , the Pietà for the soul chapel in Oberstdorf and a statue of the Madonna for the Westfriedhof in Munich , which was placed on a Marian column , were created in 1941 according to Goossens's plans . Many smaller orders followed and it was primarily reserved for Goossens' talent to design coherent themes in the smallest of spaces and to make them expressive, preferably on limewood.

After Johanna Biehler's death in 1954, Goossens moved to Attel in the Rosenheim district , where she was socially committed to the Christian Attl Foundation , which runs a facility for people with disabilities in Attel Abbey , and where the disabled people there in exchange for free board and lodging encouraged and promoted creative craft and artistic activities. She did this until her death in 1968. She was buried in the cemetery of the Abbey Church of St. Michael in Attel.

Her work was shown posthumously in 2014/2015 in the exhibition “Off to Munich! Women artists around 1900 ”at the Munich City Museum . Her great-niece Cornelia Goossens has been running an art studio in Dießen am Ammersee since 1970 as a master ceramist .

Works (selection)

  • Portals in blue ceramic for the “House of the Woman” at the Werkbund exhibition in Cologne in 1914
  • Pietà in the Oberstdorf Soul Chapel
  • Madonna figure on column in Westfriedhof Munich

literature

  • Werner Ebnet: You lived in Munich: biographies from eight centuries. BUCH & media, 2016, p. 223 ( digitized )
  • Susanna Partsch : Goossens, Minni . In: General Artist Lexicon . The visual artists of all times and peoples (AKL). Volume 58, Saur, Munich a. a. 2008, ISBN 978-3-598-22798-1 , p. 459.
  • Majolica by Goossens-Biehler. In: Die Kunst: Monthly magazine for free and applied arts. F. Bruckmann, Munich 1914, pp. 425–430 ( digitized )

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Off to Munich! - Artists around 1900 , exhibition program Stadtmuseum Munich Sep. 2014 - Feb. 2015
  2. ↑ Ceramics master Cornelia Goossens , press kit Diessen 2010
  3. ↑ The soul chapel in the old Oberstdorf cemetery. in the Oberstdorf Lexicon.
personal data
SURNAME Goossens, Hermione
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Goossens, Minni (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German sculptor and ceramist
DATE OF BIRTH July 21, 1878
PLACE OF BIRTH Aachen
DATE OF DEATH February 8, 1968
Place of death Attel (Wasserburg am Inn)