Stilleben mit Glasei

Dr. Ralf Burmeister has confirmed the authenticity of this work.

Suffused with a dreamlike atmosphere, Hannah Höch’s enigmatic watercolour Stilleben mit Glasei was created in 1922, just as the artist’s involvement with the Berlin DADA group was coming to an end. Always a highly individual, multi-faceted artist, watercolour had been an important aspect of Höch’s artistic practice since her youth, and during the early 1920s she used this medium to explore increasingly metaphysical, romantic subject matter. In this vein, the otherworldly flower at the heart of Stilleben mit Glasei appears at once familiar and yet distinctly bizarre, its roots entirely visible above the soil and pot, as if the whole plant is levitating in mid-air, while a delicate blue bloom sprouts from the centre of the larger flower. To its right stands a small decorative glass egg (the Glasei of the title), its smooth contours and tear-drop shape appearing as a strange counterpoint to the natural forms of the plant. Gifted to the artist when she was a young child by a family friend from Weimar, the Glasei formed part of the vast personal collection of ephemera and mementos that Höch cultivated over the course of her life. This cabinet of curiosities was filled with ‘memorabilia of events, friends, peculiarities, pretty ideas, handicrafts’ that had caught her interest, and became a well-spring of inspiration for the artist, these unusual objects often appearing unexpectedly in her paintings or collages (H. Höch, quoted in H. Bergius, Das Lachen Dadas: Die Berliner Dadaisten und ihre Aktionen, Giessen, 1989, p. 132).

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