A while back, I did a fairly flippant post about the 4 bronze panels in front of the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz.

Walked past them often enough on the way to and from the market, but never thought to find out anything about them.
Tasked with doing so by the Faithful (Virginia, Kate, Paul, Gucki et al), I quickly found out that there is NO easily accessible knowledge about the sculptures.

• The museum shop knows nothing
• The museum management knows nothing (well, ALMOST nothing and if they know more, they’re not telling…)
• The city knows nothing
• The cultural chroniclers know nothing
• The guidebooks know nothing
• Wikipedia knows nothing
• Google knows nothing bugger all

This is about to change.

• I’ve tracked down the artist
• I know the history of the commission
• I know the story of the gates and how they were made almost 50 years ago
• I’ve learnt the casting process from a local fine art foundry
• I’ve learnt that when you tell people the story, they’re spellbound

It’ll be an 12-part serialisation starting today.

I’ve now (2017) updated the information and rolled it into one article here

By the end of it, we’ll have a repository of available knowledge about a work of art from a sculptor described as “one of the most important artists of figurative sculpture of the second half of the 20th century”

What I can’t get my head around, though, is why I’m the only person who’s ever bothered to try and find out.

It’s not as if you can overlook them.

They’re as big as barn-doors , for goodness’ sake…

12 May This entry was published on 12 May, 2011 at 07:00. It’s filed under Gutenberg Museum, Mainz, The gates of the Gutenberg Museum and tagged Karl-Heinz Krause, Rainer Schell. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.