How much you would have liked to watch him at work.

Viewed up close, Lovis Corinth's still lifes with flowers reveal an explosion of superimposed or juxtaposed impasto brushstrokes in varied mixtures of green, red, violet, orange and brown tones with reflections of white or yellow, then blue tones.

The fine traces of the bristles can also be seen, because the brushwork has become an impetuous, yet finely controlled dance of the painting gesture in terms of expression.

Every brushstroke is twitching life - this is how the art critic Gustav Pauli described Lovis Corinth's painterly gesture in 1924, whose vitality, energy and expressiveness is unparalleled in his late work.

With a little more distance from the picture, the impressions of "Amaryllis, Lilacs and Anemones" (1920) emerge from the riot of colors, then an exuberant bouquet with "Flowers in a Bronze Bucket" or "Flowers in a Vase" (both from 1923).

Finally, Corinth turns the brush over and uses the handle to scratch his name into the fresh paint, as in “Chrysanthemums in a Jug” from 1918 or “Helle Rosen” from 1915.

The Karsten Greve Gallery never ceases to amaze with exhibitions of museum quality that bring rarely shown artists or subjects to attention.

A few years ago, there were queues in Paris to see the show of fifty works by Giorgio Morandi (FAZ, September 30, 2017).

Another time, the Cologne gallery owner had the ceramic Crucifixion sculptures by Lucio Fontana discovered.

He recently showed the late finger paintings of the Swiss art brut artist Louis Soutter in Paris and Cologne.

Each of these art historical exhibitions is preceded by a long planning phase.

It has now taken a decade to assemble the exquisite collection of eleven works from Lovis Corinth's late years.

In addition to nine floral still lifes, the exhibition also includes a "Self-Portrait at Walchensee" from 1922 and the preliminary study "Knight Armor and Sword" from 1918. This is the first gallery exhibition ever to be held on Lovis Corinth in Paris.

The paintings are set in plain white shadow gap frames and are accompanied by poems by Rilke, Trakl and Schickele on the high walls.

The gouache sheet of a knight's armor lying on the ground, thrown off as if in a tragic molting, was created at the end of the First World War and acquired an even stronger symbolic meaning in Paris.

Born in East Prussia in 1858, Corinth studied in Paris from 1884 to 1887, just a few years after the Franco-Prussian War.

He experienced the national-political tensions there early on.

They culminated in the First World War, which also represented a turning point for Corinth.

In the last ten years of his life - he died in 1925 - he devoted himself almost exclusively to "small" subjects and was hardly interested in allegories, history paintings or religious depictions, but rather in landscapes, portraits and still lifes.

In Paris, but above all with his Berlin gallery owner Paul Cassirer, Corinth first discovered the work of Paul Cézanne, then of van Gogh, both of whom strongly influenced him.

The theme of time and transience played an increasingly important role - he had been painting a self-portrait every year since the beginning of the century.

Then about a hundred floral still lifes were created, in which the intensity of the moment, bloom and aura, but also a passing away that was already inherent in it, find expression.

In the moving "Selbstportrait am Walchensee" from 1922, the painter shows on his own face what the flower paintings also express: stopping a shimmering moment and the unrest of the soul before the passage of time.

The trilingual catalog with 260 pages is of exceptional quality and goes into detail about the provenance of each individual painting (from 850,000 euros).

Corinth's work was reviled as "degenerate" during the Nazi era, his paintings were represented in many Jewish collections, were stolen or scattered through distress sales.

A continuation of Corinth's later painterly gesture can be found in abstract expressionism, for example in Willem de Kooning: the exhibition is supplemented by a series of lithographs by the American painter (each 20,000 to 30,000 euros).

Lovis Corinth, until May 21st in the Karsten Greve Gallery, Paris, in autumn in Cologne.

Catalog 60 euros