Hommage à Rimbaud ou Ophélia

A slice of lemon, a feather, some woollen threads, tulle and paper lie on a shabby wooden surface. The lemon is gleaming, the feather looks soft, and you can almost feel the fluffiness of the wool. In the photographic still lifes that Walter Peterhans produced in around 1930, he aimed to depict the physical quality of materials as realistically as possible. Peterhans was connected to the Bauhaus as a photography tutor. Trained as a mathematician, he viewed the medium as a tool for carrying out analytical research. The combination of objects forms an abstract composition but there is also something surreal about it. The title is equally ambiguous, as various interpretations have shown. The still life has been described as a literal depiction of the poem ‘Ophelia’ (1870) by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, with the threads of wool serving as lines and the feather as a comma. The various objects have also been described as references to the poem; the loosely draped fabric might, for example, be interpreted as the water in which Ophelia floats.