Flowers by the Stream
This conversation is connected to Flowers by the Stream.
Babberger painted Flowers by the Stream in 1922, by which point he was spending regular summers on the Klausen Pass in the Swiss Alps and his work had fully committed to Expressionism. A birch tree trunk runs up the center of the composition, flanked on both sides by dense wildflowers — deep blue delphiniums, yellow daisies, pink clover, white anemones — painted in flat, bold strokes against a saturated green ground. The painting fills every inch of the surface with color and form, leaving no negative space. Babberger was close friends with Augusto Giacometti, Giovanni's uncle, whom he'd met while studying in Florence, and both painters shared an interest in the decorative potential of color.