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“Gardens and Flowers in Art from 1700 to 1940: From the Courtly Love Garden to the Inner Flower of the Modern Self”
Robert Baldwin
Associate Professor of Art History
ConnecticutCollege
New London, CT06320
(This essay was written in May, 2009 and was slightly revised in April 2010 with comments on the synthesis of the garden and the sublime in Monet’s Nympheas.)
A Summary of Garden Culture Before 1700
Before 1700, most gardens were built for the church, the aristocracy, or the wealthy middle class. Dominant during the Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance, the church garden emphasized medieval Christian values of monastic solitude, inwardness, and female chastity. By 1500, the triumph of Renaissance humanism allowed the courtly love garden to emerge as the most popular garden theme for the next three hundred years. At a time of growing social mobility and the rise of a wealthy burgher class, the courtly love garden allowed the aristocracy to affirm a timeless, closed, social order imbedded in a refined and exclusive nature while cultivating as new, open human identity free from artifice. After 1550, courtly elites also created the new formal garden which gave monumental form to courtly values of wealth, cosmic power, high culture, and the new centralized politics of the nation state(See my short essay on the RenaissanceFormalGarden). After 1570, middle class patrons created a third form of garden culture imbued with middle class values of work, marriage, family, moderation, and a more sober version of courtly leisure.
1700-1800: The Escapist Courtly Garden and the Middle Class Picturesque
Withdrawing from politics, eighteenth-century court culture produced gardens of escapist, theatrical, imaginary delight. Even at the highest levels of court culture, the state garden abandoned the fixed geometries and hierarchical spaces of the 17th-century absolutist garden for the “natural” asymmetries and curved meanderings of the picturesque English garden, an aesthetic indebted to middle class political, social, and scientific ideas. Eighteenth-century nobles and burghers also fostered a new, Rousseauean garden of childlike innocence which the Romantics took much further.
The Disappearance of the Garden from Art Between 1790 and 1860
Although social elites continued building gardens around their homes, the garden largely disappeared between 1790 and 1860 as a prominent subject in the work of leading artists. At least three larger changes undermined the garden as an artistic subject. At a time of modern revolutionary politics and social aspiration, the garden was contaminated by a 400 year tradition of courtly politics and served only to emblemize an increasingly outmoded absolutism. The garden was also degraded by four centuries of courtly lovegardens which had recently reached in the Rococo an apogee of carefree hedonism, escapist pleasure, and social obliviousness. In an early nineteenth century bourgeois modernity marked by work, marriage, and family, the garden all but disappeared from art. In contrast, middle class culture embraced modern versions of Romantic and Realist pastoral (as seen in Dickens at the end of Oliver Twist).
The traditional court garden was also rendered obsolete by old-fashioned ideas of social identity. Before the French Revolution, all gardens, whether monastic, court, or burgher, served as a place for harmonious communal activity and bonding. Indeed, the garden was the very emblem of social order, cohesion, and unity. It proclaimed a meaningful human identity which was stable, impersonal and collective. Even the medieval cloister garden of solitary meditation affirmed a deeply communal monastic existence where monks and nuns shared property and daily routines.
All that changed when Revolution and Romanticism both unleashed new dreams of individual liberty and fulfillment after the 1790s. If the garden was the most social and communal of all landscape spaces, it was out of synch with the modern, fragmented, solitary self spawned by industrialization, the collapse of the rural economy, rapid urbanization, and political revolution. With the rise of Romanticism, the traditional court garden embodied everything which was false in nature and human nature, and in the social order. The true nature discovered by the Romantics was above all wild, remote, and sublime – as seen in the wilderness landscapes of Turner, Martin, Friedrich, Koch, Cole, and Bierstadt. Here was a nature suited to the new human being discovered by the Romantics, alienated, solitary, and liberated, free to pursue its own, individual imagination into the highest wisdom.
Romanticism and the Invention of the Inner Flower
Interestingly, Romanticism transformed and preserved one element of garden culture – the single flower or small group of flowers. If the garden symbolized an outmoded collective world of shared values, the single flower of Romantic poetry and art (Blake, Novalis, Runge) symbolized the new modern humanity turned in on itself. The Romantic flower was the solitary self, fragile, uncontaminated at birth, intensely spiritual, hopeful and idealistic in its restless growth, young, free from economic burdens and political passions – a perfect nature, in short – a paradisiacal, radically subjective universe offered up in a single, vulnerable blossom. In this new world, a single infected rose could sum up the most intimate devastation of the individual psyche – “thy bed of crimson joy” - and the larger, spiritual malaise of modern life. To be sure, the subjective flower symbolism of Romanticism took center stage in only a handful of writers and artists whose work never reached a wide audience due to its radically private nature. Yet their approach to garden imagery – transformed into a few intensely scrutinized and allegorized flowers – the sunflower, the poppy, the rose, the lily – remained the most viable avenue for modern garden imagery from that point forward.
Romantic garden and flower imagery found a wider circulation in the later nineteenth century and early twentieth century with the Pre-Raphaelites, Art Nouveau, Symbolism, Nabis, Fauvism, and Expressionism. Although the court and middle class garden resurfaced with the Pre-Raphaelites and some of the early Impressionists and briefly flourished between 1890 and 1915 with late Impressionism and Fauvism, the garden never regained the widespread currency it had in the eighteenth century.
The Return of Flowers and Gardens to Art: 1865-1915
Most garden imagery of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century worked within two poles. On one end was the garden of external beauty whether bourgeois (Monet, Hassam) or aristocratic (Tissot, La Touche). This garden found fertile soil briefly in the color-saturated, empirical beauty aesthetic of early Impressionism, Art Nouveau (Mucha), Fauvism (Matisse) and Fauve inspired Nabis artists such as Bonnard and Roussel.
On the other end of the spectrum, a wide range of poets and artists after 1890 rejected the superficial beauty aesthetic of the Impressionist-Fauve garden in favor of the inner garden or solitary flower dramatically transfigured with spiritual yearnings. Here they drew on an earlier Pre-Raphaelite tradition, well-established since 1870, of secret gardens, mystical flowers (especially poppies, sunflowers, roses, lilies, and irises), and eroticized images of young women and goddesses surrounded or bedecked by flowers, gazing ecstatically at single blossoms, or surrendering to their intoxicating perfumes. Although men were rarely shown with flowers, all of these paintings worked to intoxicate male viewers and heighten male desire with the floral innocence, spirituality, and ripe beauty of floral women. (Think of Don Juan’s bitterly passionate aria, “La fleur que tu m’avais jettée,” sung in Bizet’s Carmen of 1875 or Walther’s song to Eva at the end of Wagner’s Meistersinger (1868).[1]
Pre-Raphaelite flower poetry and artoffered a powerful and appealing synthesis of late Medieval flower mysticism, a Renaissance tradition of eroticized floral imagery and classical mythology(which the Pre-Raphaelites knew well from their literary translations and adaptations) and a modern Romantic tradition of the inner flower and the private or imaginary garden. It was the Pre-Raphaelite garden and flower which opened the floodgates for the secret gardens and mystical flowers explored between 1890 and 1910 by Symbolist artists such as Van Gogh, Hodler, Redon, and the early Mondrian.
Three artists of the 1890s went so far as to develop what could be called a floral aesthetic: Redon, Vuillard, and the late Monet. No Symbolist did more to transform and revitalize flower painting than Redon. In hundreds of floral still-lives, Redon removed the flower from the mundane settings of the Pre-Raphaelites and of academic genre painters like Tissot to an indeterminate dream space of glowing “medieval” color and weightless forms. More importantly, Redon developed a floral aesthetic for all manner of subjects after 1890. Along with the dreamy, celestial woman, the innocent child, and the mystical sea voyage, the flower became a central metaphor in Redon’s Symbolist floral universe: loosely-brushed, open-ended, spatially vast, ethereal, and highly refined. Combined with the reflective child and especially the dreaming young woman, often abstracted as a floating head with closed eyes, Redon’s floral universe appears to the real viewer like the floral dream conjured up by his detached heads. Many of these floral paintings bear titles like Dream, Vision, or The Closed Eye.
Although grounded in a more mundane, familiar world of lushly decorated drawing rooms, the early Nabis art of Vuillardalso developed a larger floral aesthetic to conjure up a closed, private universe of decidedly feminine domestic spaces. In the 1890s, Vuillard’s self-enclosed world is constructed almost entirely out of floral blossoms, patterns, colors, and brushstrokes. Real flowers merge with blossoms painted on wall-paper, furniture covering, and female clothing. Saturated with floral color and brushwork, the painting creates a highly refined, distinctly feminine private world of purity, delicacy, serenity, interiority, and exquisite aestheticism. Although mothers and children occasionally appear, this is a private sphere given over not to the mundane activities of traditional middle class genre painting but to music, reading, quiet conversation, reflection, and above all the aesthetic subtlety of the painting itself as the viewer’s primary concern.
After 1890, Monet turned Impressionism inward and developed an increasingly hermetic aesthetic geared to flowers and water lilies. In the years when Symbolism emerged as the dominant movement in European art, Monet abandoned the early Impressionist project of painting modern life and set up a permanent studio amidst a large Japanese garden of his own design. Here he spent the last 35 years of his life painting over 600 garden paintings. If a garden allowed Monet to retreat from the modern world, the building of a Japanese garden allowed him to remove the floral subject even further from the mundane suburban landscapes and bourgeois leisure featured in his earlier art from 1865 to 1890.
At the same time as Monet retreated into this imaginary “Japanese” garden, his art retreated into an ever more private, Symbolist abstraction. In retrospect, it was no accident that Monet’s garden paintings in the 1890s gradually evolved toward the theme of water and the water lily. Important since the Pre-Raphaelites, the water-lily allowed writers and artists to fuse two core landscape themes found since Romanticism: the exotic or mystical flower and the mysterious, fecund, transcendent sea, subjects found in Baudelaire and even more in the Symbolist poetry of Monet’s friend and admirer, Mallarmé. Like the Japanese garden, the water-lily was also popular as a subject, appearing in a wide variety of Art Nouveau objects from engraved silverware to ceramics, glass objects, and large stained-glass windows such as Gruber’s Water Lilies of c. 1900 (Chrysler Museum).
Inspired by the latest Symbolist poetry and aesthetics, Monet’s garden painting found the perfect artistic vocabulary after 1898 when he began painting large murals of water-lilies. Spurning the easy eroticism of popular images mingling water lilies with naked women such as Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs, Monet developed a more serious, self-reflective imagery of the water-lily which became the artistic focus of his last twenty-five years. Flower and garden scenes yielded to a self-referential, Symbolist waterscape tipped up to renounce all depth and empirical reality in favor of an increasingly abstract, decorative, indeterminate, watery world of floating color. Flowers and water were gradually transformed into a painterly vision and a visionary world of colored paint. And by projecting these visions onto giant, mural-size canvases in the very later Nympheas, Monet transformed the garden with the oceanic and the sublime and remade it into something wild and remote. In traditional aesthetics since the mid-eighteenth century, the sublime was the very antithesis to the garden with its vastness repudiating everything small in scale, its wildness rejecting all false refinements, its mysteries voyaging beyond all things familiar and mundane. By creating vast oceanic gardens realized with the delicacy of Japanese folding screens, Monet’s Nympheas conflated the two primary landscape traditions of the nineteenth-century Romanticism and Symbolism: the wilderness sublime and the inner garden.
Flowers and Gardens in German Expressionism
Modersohn-Becker, Marc, Nolde (not yet written)
The Floral Aesthetic of 1890-1915 as Balancing Act: Nature vs. Abstraction
In general, the flower allowed the synthesis of two very different but overlapping zones in the late nineteenth century psyche. One the one hand, flowers exemplified the retreat into an unsoiled nature seen in late Impressionism and Symbolism – a nature which remained new, young, innocent, pure, fertile, and eternal. On the other hand, the same flower imagery exemplified the hyper refined, self-reflexive aestheticism of the new “art for arts sake”. Here was a very different kind of retreat, not into nature but into an even more comforting sphere of the private imagination, into delicate, refined, and subtle pleasures taken in small and exquisite objects and private sensibilities. In this sense, the flower was like the piece of chamber music, the Symbolist poem, the print or small painting, and exemplified the domestic arena of the imagination turned in on itself in Poe or Huysmans-like reverie amidst plush and perfumed interiors. As an object displaying sumptuous, complex, and subtle color harmonies, sinuous line verging into decorative arabesque, and compositional patterns displaying the artifice of the arranger, flowers shared much with the world of art. As nature’s most refined and delicate artistry, the flower became the foundation for that most international of modern art movements - Art Nouveau (sometimes called stile floreale in Italy) and for the somewhat related Nabis aesthetic of the early Vuillard.
By harmonizing the modernist retreat into an unspoiled nature with the retreat into a private imagination which was equally pure and spiritual, the flower aesthetic of Art Nouveau, Nabis, and Symbolism helped negotiate the growing split between nature and art which emerged with the collapse of Impressionism and the rise of more abstract, subjective styles. Between 1888 and 1915, artists struggled to reconcile the new abstraction tied to individual imagination with the remnants of the Western naturalist tradition going back to the Renaissance and ultimately, to classical antiquity. In different ways, the nude, the primitive landscape, and the flower provided a series of aesthetically fecund intermediate zones, allowing artists to move forward into ever more personal, abstract styles while embracing traditional themes grounded in a “universal” nature. At once earthly yet ethereal, tangible yet imaginary, natural yet artistic, universal yet solitary, timeless yet distinctly modern and “new” - as in Art Nouveau and Jugendstil - the flower summed up many of the contradictory yearnings of late nineteenth century thinking and lay at the center of modern aesthetics.
The Disappearance of the Garden from High Modernism 1920-1960
After 1920, the heyday of the flower was gone for many reasons. Streamlined, machine age forms seized the mantle of the New and the Modern, discrediting the traditional naturalism of floral aesthetics and making Art Nouveau look more like Art Passé. The flower was also rejected for its superficial, outward beauty (Vuillard, Matisse) which in the hands of a Mucha or a La Touche became excessive and decadent in its unrestrained profusion and eroticized intertwining with ornamental female nudes. And at a time when Cubists and Expressionists alike looked to large, bold, serious visual statements, whether rigorously intellectual or emotionally dramatic, the subtle floral world of a Vuillard appeared overly precious, “feminine,” domestic, and mundane. All this helps explain the withering of the flower as a subject in the ambitious, serious world of High Modernism starting with Cubism. With a few exceptions, especially in Surrealism, the flower and the garden was largely ignored in Cubism, Constructivism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimalism, and Earth Art. Only in modern photography was the flower welcome, ironically because it was photography which gave the flower an abstraction all the more appealing in the supposedly naturalist aesthetics imposed by the camera. From Steiglitz and Steichen to Robert Mapplethorpe’s stunning flower photographs of the 1980s, the flower has always appealed to modern photographers. Here, once again, we can speak of the solitary flower or isolated group of blossoms, not the discredited garden.