About the work

This beautiful, highly detailed floral still life originates from the period when Erich Heckel lived with his wife Siddi in Hemmenhofen on Lake Constance. In 1955, when he resigned from his professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe, the couple moved into a small house on the slope above the village.

With rapid and confident strokes, the artist here designs a floral still life in ink, which fascinates with its wealth of objects and atmospheric intensity. The work demonstrates reduced spatiality, and the lupins, standing in a vase in front of a shelf, appear to nearly merge with the background. Next to the vase is an open book, the pages of which are slightly raised; one of the lupin branches curves over these animated book pages. While the flowers are reproduced in their natural variety, they nonetheless merge in a self-explanatory way into the statics of the shelf filled with various vases and books in the background due to their linear arrangement.

The confidence with which Heckel brings this still life to paper bears witness to his creative experience and is, in its exact capturing of that seen, reminiscent of the so-called quarter-hour nudes of the early Brücke period. Because the model already changed its position every 15 minutes, the artists practised the sure and rapid capturing of the subject and its realisation in lines and forms on the pictorial ground.