After Markus Lüpertz had used the concept of the dithyramb to characterize his painting from around 1964, he began his group of works "German Motifs" around 1970. For Lüpertz, this included particularly ideologically and historically charged objects with a symbolic character, such as the steel helmet, military hats, the grain ear and the forest. Their “dithyrambic” rendering in the picture, in the sense of Lüpertz, deprived these symbols of their significance, emptied them of their expressiveness and replaced content-related affirmation with free painterly association. Lüpertz painted the "foliage tent" in 1970, the year in which he lived in Florence for a long time because of the Villa Romana Prize that was awarded to him. The still ubiquitous fascist formal language in everyday Italian life at that time and in architecture may have stimulated Lüpertz to reflect on the “German motifs” even more than before. These include the forest, which has played an important role at least since the German Romantic era as a symbol of the German, the Nordic, but also the uncanny and thus as a metaphor for the soul in art and literature.