Full Name: Gosebruch, Martin
Other Names:
- Martin Gosebruch
Gender: male
Date Born: 20 June 1919
Date Died: 17 September 1992
Place Born: Essen, Lower Saxony, Germany
Place Died: Braunschweig, Lower Saxony, Germany
Home Country/ies: Germany
Subject Area(s): Italian (culture or style), Italian Renaissance-Baroque styles, Modern (style or period), and Renaissance
Overview
Scholar of the Italian Renaissance and modern art. Gosebruch’s father, Ernst Gosebruch, was an art historian and Museum director in Essen at the time of his son’s birth. The younger Gosebruch grew up with the paintings of the Brücke artists, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Eric Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff in the living room of the family home. The elder Gosebruch was dismissed as director of the Essener Museum Folkwang in 1933 by the Nazis. In 1938 Martin was conscripted to the Reich Labor Service (Arbeits-, Wehr-, Kriegsdienst Gefangenschaft). At the end of the War he was interned at a prisoner of war until 1947. After release, he studied under the medievalist Hans Jantzen and the other scholars assembled at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Edmund Weigand and Ernst Buschor. His 1950 dissertation addressing the visual power of early 12th-century Burgundian sculpture, Über die Bildmacht der burgundischen Skulptur im frühen 12. Jahrhunderts, addressed similar theoretic issues Hans Sedlmayr did in his book Verlust der Mitte (Gädeke), perhaps because Sedlmayr had just taken over Jantzen’s position at Munich. In 1952 he was an assistant to Carl Heise at the Hamburger Kunsthalle and titular director of the Kunstverein (“art club”) for two years. He was appointed an honorary fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome for the 1954-1955 years. He wrote his habilitation in 1958 at Freiburg. He accepted a position at the Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Technische Universität Carolo-Wilhelmina zu Braunschweig (Braunschweig Technical University) in 1965. Gosebruch retired from Braunschweig in 1986. He died of heart failure in 1992. Gosebruch was methodologically conservative. He strongly disputed reformers of architectural-historical practice such as Günter Bandmann. He early embraced theoretics and wrote on it throughout his career. He abandoned the Expressionist artists supported by his father in search of their cultural heirs, much to many of the original Expressionists’ dismay (e.g., Karl Schmidt-Rottluff).
Selected Bibliography
[complete bibliography:] “Bibliographie Martin Gosebruch.” in, Steigerwald, Frank Neidhart, ed. Martin Gosebruch zu Ehren: Festschrift anlässlich seines 65. Geburtstages am 20. Juni 1984. Munich: Hirmer, 1984, pp. 210-214; [collected essays:] Unmittelbarkeit und Reflektion: methodologische Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichtswiss[chaft]. Munich: Fink, 1979, and Aufsätze und Vorträge. Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2009; [dissertation:] Über die Bildmacht der burgundischen Skultpur im frühen 12. Jahrhunderts, [unpublished] Munich, 1950; Nolde: Aquarelle und Zeichnungen. Munich: Bruckmann 1957, English, Nolde: watercolors and drawings. New York: Praeger 1973; Donatello, Das Reiterdenkmal des Gattamelata. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1958; Giotto und die Entwicklung des neuzeitlichen Kunstbewusstseins. Cologne: M. DuMont Schauberg, 1962; and Wolters, Christian, and Wiora, Walter. Methoden der Kunst- und usikwissenschaft. Enzyklopädie der geisteswissenschaftlichen Arbeitsmethoden, vol. 6. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1970; Giotto di Bondone. Constance: L. Leonhardt,1970.
Sources
Dilly, Heinrich. Kunstgeschichte als Institution: Studien zur Geschichte einer Diziplin. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979, p. 42; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. 2nd. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007, pp. 135-138; Michalski, Sergiusz, ed. Martin Gosebruch: 1919-1992, Gedenkband des Instituts für Kunstgeschichte der Technischen Universität Carolo-Wilhelmina zu Braunschweig. Braunschweig: TU, Presse- und Öffentlichkeitsarbeit, 2000; “Biography,” and Gädeke, Thomas, “Preface.” in Gosebruch, Martin. Wolfgang Klähn und die Krise der Mondern/Wolfgang Klähn and the Crisis of Modern Art. Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 2007, pp. 413 and 7-13; [obituary:] Poeschke, Joachim. “Martin Gosebruch (20.6. 1919 – 19.9. 1992).” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 56 no. 4 (1993): 592-596;