Watercolour and pencil on paper, 1921, signed and dated upper left “H. Gehri 8.6.21”.
Two nude figures stretch along a bare, sinuous branch. Below, a woman crouches on the broken trunk that serves as her base, gathering her long blond hair. Above her, a man hangs from the far end of the branch, one arm raised, the other reaching down toward her. The branch, rising from the woman’s feet to the man’s hands, joins the two figures while holding them apart.
The work belongs to Gehri’s series of lovers, in which human figures and the vegetal world merge into a single poetic language. The couple and the branch become one: the drawing captures a suspended moment between attraction and separation.
The rosy flesh tones stand out against a nuanced grey-blue ground. Here one finds what made Gehri beloved by his students: a luminous palette, a sinuous line, and an unmistakable sense of poetry. The work dates from the year after he was appointed Professor of Figure Drawing at the Badische Landeskunstschule in Karlsruhe.
A German painter trained in Dresden and Karlsruhe, with formative travels through Japan, Italy and Paris, Gehri was dismissed from his professorship by the Nazis in 1933 and labelled a “degenerate” artist in 1937. He died in the bombing of Freiburg in November 1944, which destroyed his studio and much of his life’s work.
