Strawberries

Before a bare wall, near the corner of a table, stand a bowl filled with bright red strawberries and a dessert plate with whipped cream, a spoon sticking out of it, ready for serving. The deliberately spare motif bears witness to Max Slevogt’s study of Edouard Manet, who had dedicated himself intensively to the genre of the still life from 1880 until his death, creating still-life arrangements of the utmost simplicity. By arranging and presenting his more or less prosaic materials, Manet had shown that painterly quality does not depend on the object portrayed, but that each object might instead become worthy of painting by the manner in which it is depicted. In addition to Strawberries, nine further paintings by Max Slevogt are in the possession of the Kunsthalle Bremen, as well as 24 drawings and some 120 prints, the majority of which came to the museum while Emil Waldmann held the directorship, in the 1910s and early 1920s. Strawberries is an example of the early presentation of contemporary art at the Kunstverein zu Bremen. It was put on display as early as 1908, at the 36th Great Exhibition of the Kunstverein, where it was subsequently purchased by a private Bremen collector, and later bought from him by the Kunsthalle, in 1923.