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Still Life with Flowers Max Slevogt

Artist

Max Slevogt Landshut, 1868 – Neukastel, 1932

Culture German
Date 1921
Object type painting
Medium, technique oil on canvas
Dimensions

51 x 61 cm

Inventory number 465.B
Collection Department of Art after 1800
On view This artwork is not on display

Slevogt’s first pictures were distinguished by the brown tones he learnt to use in the studio of the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. After his 1889 trip to Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian, his early style was replaced by the brighter
palette of the plein air, which he first encountered here, and he painted his forms in constant motion with loose, expressive brushstrokes. He settled in Munich, where his role models were Wilhelm Leibl and Arnold Böcklin, and he mastered the
painterly expression of sensual impressions and unrestrained imagination following the latter artist’s symbolist approach. He was one of the founders of
the Munich Secession in 1892, and after moving to Berlin in 1901 he joined the local Secession group. His art took on ever more vibrant colours and dramatic force from around the 1900s, first suffused with the spirit of Jugendstil and that of
expressionism, of which he can be regarded as one of the important forerunners.
Slevogt travelled in Egypt in 1914. The paintings and drawings he produced there were even airier than before, characterised by a mature balance between sketchy representation and pure forms.
At the outbreak of World War I, he served as an army painter for some weeks on the western front, from where he returned utterly disillusioned. The memories of the war exerted a prolonged influence on the themes and atmosphere of his paintings, and during this period he was looking for forms of expression to convey horror in his compositions. He was elected a member of the Prussian Academy of
Arts in 1914 but it filled him with disappointment that the representatives of the new trends emerging during the Weimar Republic looked upon his generation as the remnants of a bygone era. The feeling of his inner anguish even left a mark on
this relatively late Still Life with Flowers. As a mature artist, Slevogt sought to find ways to record forces beyond the visible. Through his pictorial imagination he was able to create a powerful sensual experience even in a simple subject like a floral still life. The vivid colours and the loose brushstrokes do not exude the freedom and freshness of impressionism and the soul sensuously easing into nature but appear as exalted gestures conveying an inner struggle.

Ferenc Tóth

References

Treasures from Budapest : European and Hungarian masterpieces from the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest and the Hungarian National Gallery: Japan-Hungary friendship 150th anniversary: Exhibition at the National Arts Centre, Tokyo, on the 150th anniversary of the Japanese-Hungarian friendship 2019.12.04 – 2020.03.16., Nikkei Inc, Tokyo, 2019.

This record is subject to revision due to ongoing research.

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