Joseph Enseling
1886-1957, sculptor, mediator, teacher
He was the student of great teachers and the teacher of great students: Joseph Enseling.
The sculptor studied at the School of Arts and Crafts or School of Applied Arts in Düsseldorf, Germany. His students deserve mention as well and Joseph Beuys stands out among them as an innovator of art.
Enseling's training and his more than 40 years of teaching at what was to become the Folkwangschule Essen and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf make the artist, who died in 1957, a great mediator between modernism and contemporary art, or even the interface of sculptural art in the 20th century. Enseling created a significant body of his work in all these years. Mostly he did it on commission, whether for private clients, in an (industrial) architectural context or for a monument.
His human figures are particularly expressive. To this day, they have an effect precisely because they are not intended to be merely academic studies of the body but show modern man as an active person who comes to terms with his world. Many of his works were installed in industrial areas on the Rhine and Ruhr. Enseling's insistence on contemporary reality is also clearly evident in his "Madonna" from 1920.
