MAN IS LIKE A FLOWER IN THE FIELD
Ray-like compositional lines guide the viewer’s gaze upwards from the lower edge of the picture across the paper surface, from the centre appears a human shape, flanked by curved lines that refer to plants or figures. These fleeting pictorial signs remain sketchy and suggestive, while the colours are stronger, cooler on the outside and lighter and warmer towards the inside of the picture. The searching eye meanders along the lines and colour sections through a mixed world of floral and anthropomorphic forms.
Andreas Felger refers to a well-known Bible Psalm (103:15): “For he (…) remembers that we are dust. In his life man is like grass, he blooms like a flower in the field; when the wind passes over it, it is no longer there, and its place is no longer known” and so the watercolour has found its way into Felger’s Pictures of the Bible (Hünfelden 2006). Thematically, transience is emphasised here, the delicacy and vulnerability of flowers is transferred to human mortality. In the watercolour, the painter illustrates this symbolism through sketchiness as well as the oscillation between figuration and abstraction. Appearance and decay become visible and tangible; in a biblical context, this interplay between man and plant symbolises the changes in the existence of all living things. Death is too strong and one-sided a word in the flow of these inner-pictorial transitions, which are soft and blurred.
The reference to the “flower in the field” also has a poetic quality, to which the painter responds in colour. In Heinrich Heine’s poem, “Du bist wie eine Blume” (“You are like a flower”), creation and its transience are also thematised, here using the example of the religiously heightened vulnerability of the ideal of beauty embodied by the plant/girl: “You are like a flower, / So lovely and beautiful and pure; / I look at you, and wistfulness / Creeps into my heart. / I feel as if I should / Lay my hands on your head, / Praying that God will keep you / So pure and beautiful and lovely.”
Andreas Felger’s watercolour echoes many themes: The central figure in the picture is reminiscent of Jesus with his disciples in the background; the artist’s self-image and his position in the world is certainly an aspect of the work; the biblical admonition that man, like all earthly things, is transitory, speaks from the work; and finally, personal fields of association open up, such as the lyrical mood emanating from the colour effects, reminiscent of Heine’s lines of poetry and not least of its musical setting by Robert Schumann.
Text by Marvin Altner
Marvin Altner holds a doctorate in art history and is a lecturer in art studies at the University of Kassel. After a traineeship at the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg, he worked as a research assistant and curator at museums in Berlin and Hamburg and as a freelance author in the field of visual arts from the 19th century to the present. Since 2012, he has been teaching at the Kunsthochschule Kassel in the art studies program and works as a research assistant for the Andreas Felger Kulturstiftung, including as author, exhibition coordinator, and supervisor of the database of Andreas Felger’s works.