Watercolor and ink on paper, 1921, signed and dated.
Two nude figures emerge and intertwine among the tall, bending blossoms, their bodies seeming to grow directly from the stems and petals themselves. Rather than simply inhabiting nature, they become part of its fragile structure: extensions of the flowers, suspended in the same movement of blooming and decay. The elongated stems curve around them like living arabesques, transforming the composition into a vision where sensuality and vegetation dissolve into one another.
This work belongs to Hermann Gehri’s poetic universe, where the human body and the vegetal world are inseparable. The flowers here are not passive decorative motifs but living symbols of transformation and impermanence. Their blossoms open with radiant colour while already beginning to droop and fade, mirroring the fleeting vitality of youth, beauty, and desire.
Painted the year after Gehri was appointed Professor of Figure Drawing at the Badische Landeskunstschule in Karlsruhe, the work captures everything that made him beloved by his students: a luminous palette, a sinuous line, and an unmistakable sense of poetry.
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.
This is why Hermann Gehri remains such a rare artist today. Every surviving sheet is a small miracle of preservation.
