There are key images that can guide through an artist’s work like signposts. The early painting Hand mit trockenen Blumen (Hand with Dry Flowers), which is characterized by a melancholy undertone, belongs to this category of works.

It shows a man’s arm extending into the picture, with a bouquet seemingly slipping out of his hand, floating away – a gradually disappearing and withering last greeting of love? The love symbol of the mistletoe could indicate this. It defines the bouquet as the medium of an intimate message that has been lost by both the sender and the addressee. Even if one could assume that the two of them are beyond the picture’s frame, their incorporeal communication falters, becoming a still image of futile efforts at love – a love story without a happy ending?

Many of Goller’s later paintings, especially his portraits of women, move the motifs into an unbridgeable distance. They reflect a biographically rooted experience of loss that even art cannot overcome.

Memories were a central driving force for Goller. Thus, in one of the paintings from 1949, the watchmaker appears, who ran his business not far from the milliner’s store of Goller’s mother. Stretched out upon a sofa and surrounded by a network of ornamental shapes, he looks at the back wall of his salesroom.

One might assume that his attention focuses on the fidgety ballet of the clocks, on the ceaseless flow of time and hence on his profession, yet his gaze rests upon something else, on a tiny, coquettish woman’s head enthroned somewhat hidden above one of the clocks. Its irresistible attraction catapults the respectable watchmaker mentally into a realm out of time and space, the yearning for eternal love has caused the clocks to fall silent.

No ticking is perceptible here because Goller is aiming at a new type of still life. The power of things and, not least, the magical presence of women take the place of a legible pictorial history.

The caryatid-like female figures of those years provide an example of this. We encounter them in Sitzende Frau (Sitting Woman), who, monumentalized by the stretched, stele-like format of the painting, resembles a high priestess rather than a human being of flesh and blood. Crowned by a nimbus of two irregular diamonds/squares, her visionary gaze and her ritual gestures are directed towards an afterlife, however defined, which magically charges the present reality of the artwork. Accordingly, the painting conveys the aura of a sacred super-reality that is typical of Goller’s visionary portraits of women from the 1950s.

Two essential characteristics of Goller’s pictorial language come together in Akt und Hut (Nude and Hat): the inexpressive rigidity of the women on the one hand and the mysterious agility of common objects on the other.

The female nude on the left looks much more like a marble statue than a living woman. The paleness of her skin, the elaborated shading, the blank stare and the robe draped around her hips give her the appearance of an ancient goddess placed like an eikon in an architectural wall niche. Meanwhile, her counterpart, the hat stand, appears to become human: Its composition imitates the vertical alignment of the female figure, the hat serves as a placeholder for the head and the free-floating flowers complete the stand with outstretched arms.

The human becomes the object and the object becomes human. Goller’s paintings show inverted realities in a field of tension between enigmatic liveliness and emotionless detachment.

From the 1950s onwards, Goller’s compositions were increasingly embedded in an architecture of abstract, decorative forms.

In Hut und Katze (Hat and Cat), the ornamental background even extends to the titular motifs – the heavily elaborated shading creates sharp outlines that make the depicted bodies and objects appear as collections of geometric shapes: the circular thigh, the rounded tail and back of the cat, the abstracted hats, the clear lines of the woman’s body and the mosaic-like pattern of her clothing.

The ornamentalization of the figures and objects frees them even more from their meaning, turning them, like the decorative shapes, into purely physical objects. At the same time, the hats, the cat and the woman stand out from the two-dimensional ornamental carpet due to their exaggerated plasticity.

The motifs, which are each metaphorical placeholders for Goller’s memories, assert themselves against the all-engulfing ornament – against oblivion.  

Goller’s paintings are comparable to painted collages: seemingly unrelated motifs are placed next to each other on a colored surface and are strictly separated from each other by frames. Nevertheless, the painting appears as a unit due to color and formal correspondences. Various shades of gray and the shape of the square define the entire composition; the golden ornaments and volutes of the mirror repeat themselves in the splayed figure of the dog.

The work radiates a symmetrical harmony that also matches Goller’s private life: the orderly and uneventful life of a reclusive loner. At the same time, his youth was marked by various tragedies: he experienced wars, economic crises and shattering world conditions.

Does his repeated recourse to geometric forms and frames perhaps express a desire for order and symmetry? Is it a painterly attempt to escape the chaotic events of the time and to counter them with a structured and orderly system?

Bruno Goller’s painterly work spans more than seven creative decades and has undergone significant changes during this stretch of time. The changes lie less in the motifs – where he always remains true to his own iconography – than in the concrete formation of the picture.

His earliest works, often still narrative in nature, are mostly small-format and muted in color. From the 1950s onwards, his palette brightens and his colors become more intense and luminous. A rich ornamental setting concentrates the eye on a central motif.

Finally, in the last few years, the compositions become freer again, floating in an airily painted field of color, as can be seen in Drei Mädchen (Three Girls). This is where everything starts to tilt and a form of age-related sovereignty allows Goller to play a little with his standard motifs. These include the roses, the leaf ornamentation and, of course, the confrontation with the female counter-world, which still dominates even his latest paintings.

1901 Bruno Aloysius Goller is born on November 5 in Gummersbach, the last of six children of Emmeline Helena Wehler (1858–1923), milliner, and Franz Carl Goller (1856–1904), technical supervisor at the Steinmüller boilerworks and iron foundry in Gummersbach. Of his five older siblings, only two brothers are still alive at the time of his birth.

1904 Sudden death of his father on September 10. The family now depends financially on the earn­ings from the mother’s millinery shop on the ground floor of their house at Kaiserstraße 26, whose construction in 1898/1899 had entailed extensive debts.

1912 After he sees a zeppelin flying over the city in April, Goller begins to build a functioning flying appa ­ratus to which he also applies his aesthetic expectations. He prac­tices flying with it at the Alter Schützenplatz in Gummersbach, to the amazement of other children.

1913 After an additional year of ele­mentary school, Goller eventually succeeds in passing the admission examination for the secondary school in Gummersbach.

1914 His older brother, clerk at the district court in Gummersbach, is drafted for military service at the beginning of the World War I and is immediately wounded. Goller visits him at the military hospital in Lemgo. Having re­turned to the front, his brother is reported missing half a year later.

1916 Goller leaves the secondary school without graduating at the end of his compulsory school at­tendance. As the son of a milliner, he doesn’t feel that he belongs there; according to his memories, he had to repeat several years of instruction there. On the day after his fifteenth birthday, he “simply didn’t go back to school.”

1917 Goller quickly abandons the attempt to gain his lower school certificate at the Lehrinstitut Schmitz in Cologne. Since he is interested in decorating cakes with a piping bag as part of the confectioner’s profession, his mother endeavors to no avail to find him a place as an apprentice at Café Eigel in Cologne.

Beginning of an apprenticeship as a metalworker at the machine works Schiess-Defries AG in Düsseldorf, intended to serve as the basis for an engineering career suggested by the son of a female customer at the millinery store who was impressed by Goller’s flying apparatuses. Goller finds lodging in Düsseldorf with the distantly related family of a sergeant and must share a bed with one of the children. He is the object of crude pranks at the factory. Goller is homesick. When one evening after a few days at the apprenticeship he passes by a church and hears the devotional service, there is nothing keeping him and he simply returns home.

After abandoning the apprentice­ship, Goller once again helps out in the millinery store, “but I was ashamed, because that wasn’t the right thing for me either.” Some­times he also decorates the display window: “whereupon everyone in Gummersbach would stop in front of it.” He begins to do a bit of drawing; copies of reproductions from popular art magazines. Goller quickly realizes: “You can do that; you understand it.”

1918 Near the end of the World War I comes news of the death of the eldest brother, missing in action. “That was my mother’s favorite son.” Goller’s other brother, the merchant Franz Werner Goller, who had returned from Berlin to the parental home because of tuberculosis, dies as well, on February 19, after being bedridden for several years. Goller remains alone with his mother, who suffers from heart disease. “She was at a complete loss, always lay on the ground, white as a sheet, with me in-between, utterly bewildered. The business was failing as well. My mother always sat there sew­ing on the hats. There was never a happy moment.”

1919 In Berlin, where at the beginning of the year he purchases wares for his mother because of the French occupation of Cologne, Goller sees Kirchner’s Rheinbrücke Köln (1914) at the Kronprinzenpalais “with the big pink arches,” which leaves a deep impression on him.

Starting in spring, lessons with the landscape painter Julius Jungheim in Düsseldorf, recommended fortuitously by a temporary helper in the store, who is distantly re­lated to Jungheim.

Goller rents a room on Duisburger Straße in Düsseldorf.

1920 Goller continues to suffer from homesickness; until 1927 he can paint exclusively in Gummersbach, where he has set up a studio in the attic of his parental home.

Beginning of friendships with the Ukrainian violinist, composer, and painter Yefim Golyshev and the composer and music theoretician Herbert Eimert, both of whom Goller meets in Gummersbach. Further friendships lasting many years develop with the painter Ernst Schumacher and the art writer Will Frieg from Soest.

1922 In spring, Goller travels with Jungheim to paint landscapes in the countryside, for the last time, because he was “no longer inter­ested in staying with Jungheim.”

That same spring in Gummers­bach he paints the oil on canvas Trockene Blumen, which is the first work of Goller’s independent oeuvre. “When I painted the picture, I was happier than ever before in my life.”

Goller sees Kahnweiler’s mono­graph Der Weg zum Kubismus (“The Path to Cubism,” Munich 1920) in a shop window and pur­chases it. The essence of new painting by Picasso, Braque, and Léger, described in the book in words and illustrations, offers him confirmation of his right to embark on his own artistic path.

The Grand Art Exhibition at the Städtischer Kunstpalast Düssel­dorf (May 27 to October 15) shows Goller’s Ruhrlandschaft along with Jungheim’s Vorfrühling. This is Goller’s first participation in an exhibition. His picture is sold.

At the same time as the national­istically oriented Grand Art Ex­hibition, Düsseldorf is also the scene of the antagonistic 1st International Art Exhibition, with 344 artists from nineteen coun­tries (May 28 to July 3), organized by the artists’ group Das junge Rheinland and, because of a lack of public support, shown at the Tietz department store. Goller’s friend Golyscheff is represented with six works. For the first time, Goller sees works by Rousseau, Matisse, Picasso, and Braque in the original and is overwhelmed by Chagall’s Sabbath (1910).

1923 Death of his mother on November 11.

Brief journey to Borkum with Golyshev towards the end of the year.

1924 From March 1924 to February 1925, Goller travels through Italy with Will Frieg and Frieg’s girl­friend. During that time he sublets his studio, set up only recently, at the Prinz-Georg-Straße 77.

1927 Goller now lives and works exclu ­sively in Düsseldorf. The rent from his parental home in Gummers­bach assures him of a minimal financial basis.

In May and June, Ernst Schumacher and Goller visit Will Frieg, who has lived on Capri since 1925.

Goller becomes a member of the artists’ group Das Junge Rhein­land and participates with four pictures in its exhibition at the Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. He also becomes more closely affiliated with the circle around Johanna Ey. She sometimes pur­chases one of his pictures and offers it for sale in her gallery.

1929 Member of the Rheinische Sezession.

Encounter with Elisabeth Nipshagen (1911–1991).

When Thomas Mann reads at the Düsseldorf artists’ association Malkasten on November 17, Goller is among the listeners and is perturbed by “so much vanity”. “He doesn’t know anything about the little things in life.”

1930 Member of the Rheingruppe and the Malkasten.

Over the course of the touring exhibition Mutter Ey Düsseldorf, pictures by Goller are seen for probably the first time beyond Düsseldorf.

In September, he participates in the annual exhibition of the Rheingruppe at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf with four works, in­cluding Lenins Bruder Alexander Uljanow (“Lenin’s Brother Alex­ander Ulyanov,” pastel on calico). Concerning the title, he says that Schumacher advised him: it will sell better than if it were simply called “Young Man.” In 1933, Goller will destroy the picture for fear of reprisals.

1931 He leaves Malkasten after a dispute over political direction with regard to the decoration by Arthur Kaufmann, Ernst Schumacher, Jean Paul Schmitz, and Goller of a room for the carnival celebration. Along with Goller and the three other artists, a fifth of the members leave the artists’ association, which is now for the most part National Social­ist in orientation.

1933 Marriage to Elsbeth Nipshagen on August 15, Elsbeth’s 22nd birth­day. The artists Jean Paul Schmitz and Ludwig Gabriel Schrieber are witnesses; waiting outside the registry office is Ernst Schumacher.

With the beginning of the National Socialist era, Goller retreats further into isolation. Although he is hardly affected in practical terms, any artistically free activity is no longer conceivable.

1934 Forced closure of Galerie Ey in April.

The financial situation of the Gollers worsens. Efforts to paint pictures with unsuspicious and pleasing subjects meet with little success. With increasing frequency, the Gollers are compelled to defer debt payments or to pawn possessions.

1936 In May/June, probably Goller’s first solo exhibition at Galerie Rudolf Stuckert in Blumenstraße, Düsseldorf. Not a single picture is sold.

1937 Virtually no pictures are painted until the end of the so-called “Third Reich”; Goller hides those that already exist. He is haunted by a remark made by the head of the Reich Chamber of Culture, whom he encounters in a bar in the old town: it is time for him (Goller) as well to be reeducated.

1940 Goller is summoned for a medical examination on July 22 and, after a brief training period lasting some eight weeks, is sent to France for military service.

1943 Destruction of the house in the Prinz-Georg-Str. 77 through in­cendiary bombs during the night from June 11 to 12. Loss of the studio along with almost all the works (circa 100) with the excep­tion of six: Mädchenbildnis (1927), Der Rock (1929), Haus und Hund (1929), Zwei Frauen am Tisch (1934), Frauenbildnis (1938) and a further picture.

1945 From April to September, stay in a military hospital in Regensburg as a prisoner of war held by the Americans. Surgery for an injury to his left eye caused by shrapnel.

After his double release, Goller returns to Düsseldorf, where Elsbeth Goller has moved into a temporary apartment in Zieten­straße 51.

Resumption of painting.

On December 21, Galerie Hella Nebelung in Düsseldorf opens an Exhibition of Contemporary Art: Painting–Sculpture–Textile Art with the participation of Goller.

1946 Renewed membership in the Rheinische Sezession.

Rental of an apartment with studio at Franz-Jürgens-Straße 12 on September 1.

1949 Membership in the Neue Rhein­ische Sezession.

For the winter semester 1949/50, Goller obtains a teaching appoint­ment from the Staatliche Kunst ­akademie Düsseldorf to supervise the introductory class in drawing, whereupon his successful col­leagues Ewald Mataré and Georg Meistermann do not want to ac­cept any more students from this class, as Goller later remembers.

His responsibilities at the acad­emy takes up a lot of Goller’s energy and, at least during the initial years, limit his artistic productivity.

1950 Goller travels to Paris for the 6th Salon de Mai, to which he has contributed two pictures.

Cornelius Prize of the City of Düsseldorf.

1953 After being appointed to a pro ­fessorship, Goller offers his own class in painting, which is attend ­ed, among others, by Konrad Fischer-Lueg, Johannes Gecelli, Jochen Hiltmann, Konrad Klapheck, and Blinky Palermo.

1955 At the 5th Exhibition of the Deut­scher Künstlerbund on the prem­ises of the Kunstverein Hannover, Werner Schmalenbach becomes acquainted with Goller’s oeuvre, which he supports for the rest of his life.

The Kunstverein für die Rhein­lande und Westfalen under the directorship of Hildebrand Gurlitt realizes two designs by Goller for a cloth.

1957 Transfer to a larger, neighboring studio at Franz-Jürgens-Straße 12, where Goller lives and works until his death.

1958 Werner Schmalenbach presents seventy-seven works at the Kestner-Gesellschaft Hannover in Goller’s first major solo exhibition, which is subsequently shown with sixty-seven positions at the Overbeck-Gesellschaft Lübeck.

The monograph by Anna Klapheck is published.

1959 Goller participates in documenta II in Kassel with Großes Schau­fenster (1953), Zwei Frauen (1955), and Vier weiße Formen (1957).

Independent drawings executed in a large format begin to occupy an important place in Goller’s artistic work.

1964 Günter Aust presents a survey exhibition with seventy-three works by Goller at the Kunst- und Museumsverein Wuppertal.

On October 1 Goller takes early retirement at his own request.

1965 Goller represents Germany at the VIII Bienal Internacional de São Paulo with thirty-five works.

Grand Art Prize of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.

1966 Goller travels to London for an exhibition of seventeen pictures at the Hanover Gallery.

Germany is represented at the Ars Baltica in Visby/Gotland by eight artists, including Goller.

1967 In May, Goller is visited for the first time by Volker Kahmen (1939–2017), together with Goller’s erst ­while student Jochen Hiltmann. Over the years Kahmen, support ­ed by Georg Heusch, becomes Goller’s private secretary, advisor, collector, chronicler, monographer, and confidant; he organizes and curates exhibitions, assists Goller with the hanging, handles his cor­respondence, delivers speeches at exhibition openings and repre­sents Goller with expressions of thanks.

Full member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin. Right up to his death, Goller does not participate in a single members’ meeting.

Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, which Goller accepts in person.

1969 Karl Ruhrberg presents a retro­spective consisting of 109 positions at the Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf.

1970 Goller, reluctant to part with his pictures, sells Zwei Katzen (1968) to the Lefebre Gallery in New York, only to buy it back several weeks later.

1976 Opening on November 16 of an exhibition at Bahnhof Rolandseck, which becomes “a sort of perma­nent home for Goller’s pictures” (Schmalenbach in Kunstsammlung NRW 1986, p. 5). Over the years Johannes Wasmuth, driving force behind the cultural institution, purchases a considerable number of Goller’s works and becomes an important patron.

1980 Goller is awarded the Lichtwark Prize by the Senate of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg. At the ceremony on March 5, 1981 Kahmen delivers the acceptance speech on behalf of Goller.

A new type of picture – half draw­ing, half oil painting on paper — appears in Goller’s oeuvre.

1981 A woefully clueless article, albeit intended as a tribute upon Goller’s 80th birthday, appears in art and distresses Goller to such an ex­tent that he is incapable of work­ing for weeks. Kahmen observes: “The society from which he has withdrawn up to now is extending its inescapable grasp.”

The sum of 120,000 DM is paid on the art market for a large picture by Goller; the price is more than fourteen times the amount in comparison to 1969.

The monograph by Kahmen appears on the occasion of the exhibition Pictures from the Years 1929–1981 at Bahnhof Rolandseck.

1982 An exhibition originally planned for 1980 is taking place in Goller’s native town of Gummersbach.

1984 Honorary member of the Staat­liche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.

1986 Retrospective organized by Jörn Merkert at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen.

1988 On September 22, he is awarded the Order of Merit of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, accepted on his behalf by Kahmen.

1990 Establishment of the Bruno Goller-Archiv e.V. in Cologne by Volker Kahmen and Georg Heusch on July 15; it commences its activ­ities on November 3 at Jakorden­straße with the opening of an exhibition in honor of Goller’s 90th birthday.

1991 Elsbeth Goller dies on February 11.

An impressive late oeuvre is created in extreme seclusion dur­ing the 1990s.

In the final years of his life, Goller is loyally supported by Lucia Macketanz, widow of the painter and academy colleague Ferdinand Macketanz, who has been a friend of Goller’s since the mid-1930s.

1998 Death of Bruno Goller on January 19.

2001 Retrospektive zum hundertsten Geburtstag, an extensive retro­spective exhibition on the cen­tenary of his birth, curated by Martin Hentschel for the Krefelder Kunstmuseen Haus Lange und Haus Esters, and by Dieter Schwarz for the Kunstmuseum Winterthur in Switzerland.

2002 100 Bilder und Zeichnungen zum 100. Geburtstag, on January 27 the Kunstarchiv Kaiserswerth in Düsseldorf is inaugurated with the exhibition 100 Pictures and Drawings on the 100th Birthday, it serves as the home of the Bruno Goller Archive until 2019.

2012 Goller exhibition with around 50 positions from the Kahmen Collection in the Siza Pavilion at the Raketenstation Hombroich.

2019 Transfer of the Bruno Goller Archive to the Literatur- und Kunstinstitut Hombroich, head­quartered at the Rosa Haus at Museum Insel Hombroich.

This biography is based above all on the monograph by Volker Kahmen (Rolandseck 1981) as well as on unpublished material from the Bruno Goller Archive, the estate of Bruno Goller, and the estate of Volker Kahmen. The statements by Goller indicated with quotation marks come from unpublished conversational notes made by Volker Kahmen.