Stillleben

Tristesse and reality? With his rubber plant, Xaver Fuhr, born in Mannheim, places a relatively nondescript plant at the center of his picture. This is a far cry from the rich colors of the Impressionist still lifes or the wild formal experiments of their Expressionist counterparts. Instead, Fuhr shows us a world purged of passion and pulsing beauty, soberly presenting us with an excerpt from daily life, which, apart from a few remnants (the canvas stretcher frame in the background), is devoid of human traces.

It almost appears as if Fuhr is attempting to emphasize the ordinariness of a completely ordinary world. However, his picture also encapsulates a classic aspect of the still life genre, the symbolic reference to life and death, with the vigorous, evergreen house plant forming the counterpart to the bare tree in front of the window. Fuhr stages this cool atmosphere through a realistic manner of painting, and by putting—as other New Objectivist painters did—the commonplace at the center of the work.