Shape and color, of course, have always been attractive to painters, and flowers, most of us would agree, are attractive in shape and color. Every culture, it seems, enhances its surroundings by decorating with real or imagined flowers, from the beading on Ojibway moccasins to the patterns on vessels from Africa or the rugs woven in Turkey. The archeologist Andrew Marshak believes that many of the abstract symbols on Paleolithic cave walls are not abstract at all but leaves and flowers of specific plants.^[5] Shape, color, fragrance, even the names of flowers set us dreaming — rose, hyacinth, lavender, violet, iris — as if by merely saying them we could move from the ordinary to the extraordinary:

Four Cut Sunflowers,1887
(Oil on canvas, 60 x 100 cm)
BY Vincent van Gogh
Kröller-Müller Museum

In the catalog of a 2004 show entitled The Flower as Image, at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humleback, Denmark, a show in which many of the aforementioned painters and photographers appear, the curators write that “many modern artists go on painting flowers even though the subject is quite at odds with the self-understanding of modern art as a critical, innovative thing.”^[7] Flowers, unlike other subject matter such as fashion, architecture, or technology, do not change. But our conception of what is beautiful, as Charles Baudelaire famously said, is made up of the “fugitive, the contingent,” as well as the “unchanging and the immutable.”^[8] Is there a specific challenge in painting flowers, then, besides the challenge of confronting beauty in a different — one might even say an uglier — historical time? (How against such force — the force of the modern — shall Beauty hold a plea? whose action is no stronger than a flower? Shakespeare asked.) Is it that flowers, because they are emblems of beauty across time and culture, confront artists with the ever-present formal challenge to, as Ezra Pound said, make it new? Or is it that true beauty, in itself, is a destroyer of emblems? “This transitory, fugitive element,” Baudelaire writes, “whose metamorphoses are so rapid, must on no account be despised or dispensed with. By neglecting it, you cannot fail to tumble into the abyss of an abstract and indeterminate beauty,”^[8] one that has lost its power to change the way we see.

In Graves’ case, what is stunning about the flowers is that, though they are not us, there is something about them that we recognize in us.

Unless we are talking of landscape paintings such as Van Gogh’s fields of sunflowers or poppies, flowers usually belong to the genre we call still lives, an oxymoron that many critics have pointed out. (It is said that American Indians could ambush and conquer regiments of white soldiers by simply sitting in tall grass and waiting for them to come to them. They could do so because we expect life to move.) Fruits and vegetables are arranged artificially on a table, sometimes a jug of wine or flask of olive oil, less frequently an animal, a fish or hare. The task of the still life painting is to bring to life that which is still. In Graves’ case, what is stunning about the flowers is that, though they are not us, there is something about them that we recognize in us. What is that? Perhaps it is their stillness, their solitude. Perhaps it is their radiance. Perhaps it is the fact that they do not open up to us, and yet seem as if they could, a metaphysical challenge par excellence. “The paint becomes coldly voluptuous,” Yau writes about the Graves’ paintings, “and, in that regard, resembles the flowers themselves, “sensual inhabitants of their own private domain,” an echo of which we can find a poem by Jules Supervielle, found in Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenological book on the image, The Poetics of Space: “sensitive inhabitants of the forests of ourselves.”^[9]

It seems obvious that Graves did not quit seeing as a metaphysician when he began painting his winter and summer bouquets, just as Mondrian did not abandon his formal experiments when he painted his impossibly blue chrysanthemums. Their preoccupations, one could argue, were not with beauty so much as how to use visual form to express intangible and interior realities that were, of course, in dynamic relationship with the tensions created by a rapidly industrialized, and diminished, natural world. Flowers seem intrinsically to lend themselves to this effort as their forms and colors are timeless, cosmopolitan, and decidedly not human — neutral, in fact — and yet at the same time they mirror to us, albeit in a dramatically accelerated fashion, human processes, whether interior or exterior. They enter the world fragile. They bloom, decay, and die. They are ephemeral and yet joyously alive. They come to us concretely, already dressed in figurative language. As Yau writes, “Flowers are always both themselves and symbols to be read.”^[10]