Horst JANSSEN

From the 1970s onwards Horst Janssen produced a number of still life drawings of flowers placed in glasses or bottles. As he noted, however, in the text accompanying a book of his still life drawings and prints, ‘“My” still-life very rarely fits the historical sense of the term. In other words, the cut edge of a table, the triangular-cornered tablecloth or brocade cover, on it the deer skull with the purple beads in its nose, or a corresponding pheasant, next to it a bowl of grapes and peaches, then the sumptuous bouquet of flowers and on it the cutest butterfly and perhaps also a robin that is just…etc. etc. A 17th-century Dutch still-life. That is not “my” still-life…I recall the clever term used by those clever wordsmiths the French: “Nature Morte.” For all the examples assembled here, whether Baroque painting, bourgeois flower bouquet or dead moth without “background or backdrop” are covered by this “Nature Morte.” In case of doubt, it could even be a self-portrait. Title: Frightened to death.’