Hensler, Arnold

Sculptor, landscape designer, designer

Born: 23.07.1891 in Wiesbaden

died: 10.05.1935 in Trier

Hensler studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Mainz. From 1912 to 1914, he was a master student of the sculptor, architect, painter and craftsman Bernhard Hoetger, who created the plane tree grove on the Mathildenhöhe in the Darmstadt artists' colony with reliefs and sculptures. Hensler then worked as a freelance artist in Berlin and later in Wiesbaden, where he married the progressive designer and photographer Annie Möring in 1922.

Study trips to Western and Southern European countries gave him a good feel for materials and techniques, which was indispensable for the creation of figures, reliefs, free-standing sculptures or honorary paintings in Wiesbaden or in towns on the Rhine. In a moderate modernist style, he created the sculptural ensemble on the gable façade and the four Gothic-style niche figures in the octagon of the Wiesbaden Museum, as well as the frieze of figures above the portal of the Landeshaus and the elements, four symbolic stone bosses. Hensler gained renown through his portrait busts of the Berlin dancer Tatjana Barbakoff, the writers Ernst Lissauer and Hermann Kesser, the conductor Otto Klemperer and the art collector Heinrich Kirchhoff.

Initially more open to cosmopolitan perspectives, Hensler increasingly began to adopt a traditionally Christian position, as expressed in the crucifixion group at Limburg Cathedral. The artist is buried in the cathedral's old cemetery.

Hensler understood how to unite cultural landscape, architecture and sculpture in one formal language. In 1932, he gave Wiesbaden an urbanistic accent. In cooperation with Edmund Fabry and Wilhelm Hirsch, he created the Reisinger and Herbert complexes, in which the idea of springing water as the embodiment of the genius loci was realized. However, restrictions prevented the realization of a Gesamtkunstwerk.