In "Blooming and Dying with the Example of a Large Tulip Tree" (2000), Herma Körding embraces the complexity of the life cycle with clarity and fearlessness. The tree’s blossoms are rendered in various stages of vitality and decay, suggesting not only time’s passage but the emotional weight carried in growth, grief, and transformation. Körding resists romanticizing this process, instead offering a deeply felt meditation on how beauty and impermanence coexist within the same living form.

Herma Körding
Herma Körding (1927–2010) was a German painter and draftsman known for her expressive portraits and structured still lifes, rooted in traditional techniques yet marked by personal vision. Trained in Karlsruhe, Paris, and Düsseldorf, she studied under artists such as Wilhelm Schnarrenberger and Jean Dupas, developing a figurative style that resisted the abstraction dominating postwar art. Körding worked primarily in oil and drawing media, focusing on quiet domestic subjects—often everyday people and natural objects—rendered with clarity, pattern, and emotional depth. In 1963, she became the first woman to win the Pfalz Prize for Painting, and in 1972 was awarded the Croix de Chevalier pour l’Art et Humanisme in Lyon. An advocate for women artists, she was the only woman on the board of Düsseldorf’s Künstlerverein Malkasten for many years and led efforts to expand exhibition opportunities for female creators. Her legacy as a dedicated figurative artist and cultural contributor in Düsseldorf continues to be celebrated through exhibitions and public honors.