Say It with Flowers

Winter is approaching in the French village of Giverny, the home of Claude Monet, and so the flowers are dying back in his glorious gardens, even those famous waterlilies in the lake that were such an inspiration for his paintings. But just down the road, at the Musée des impressionnismes, summer lives on, and the blooms are vibrant, celebrating the power of flowers in art.

We called in to the museum just before Monet's Garden closed for the season, possibly the only people among the many hundreds of visitors in the village that day who'd gone to Giverny specifically to see the exhibition called Flower Power. We weren't disappointed; the curators have put together an opulent bouquet of painting, sculpture, photography and design. 

The Musée des impressionnismes is, we suspect, a bit of an irrelevance to the great mass of tourists in Giverny determined to tick the footbridge over Monet's lily pond off their selfie photo list. But for the more discerning art-lover like yourself, dear reader, it's a fine exhibition space that regularly stages attractive shows.  

Flower Power starts off by introducing us to how flowers got their names through stories from antiquity, as seen through the works of 19th-century painters and sculptors. That may not sound very promising, but it's actually a bit of a revelation. The explanations on the wall texts are excellently informative, breathing life into works that might otherwise go over the head of the non-classical scholar. 

First off is the story of Hyacinth....  

Hyacinth was loved by the sun god, Apollo, who wounded him fatally while teaching him to throw the discus. Apollo created a red flower, the hyacinth, from his beloved's blood, which you can just see on the ground by the discus. The Death of Hyacinth by Jean Broc -- not an artist we've knowingly come across before -- is an unexpectedly homoerotic painting for 1801, with Apollo tenderly holding the lifeless body of Hyacinth. "The blood which had spilled from the wound to the ground and darkened the green grass suddenly ceased to be blood; and a flower brighter than Tyrian purple rose from the earth," Ovid wrote in his Metamorphoses. 

GF Watts -- the painter and sculptor referred to by the Victorians as England's Michelangelo -- normally tends to leave us a bit cold, but we were much impressed by his very first sculpture, interpreting the myth of Clytie. 

Clytie was in love with Helios (he's another sun god, for those of us who find all this mythology a bit confusing), but he didn't love her, because he was enamoured of Leucothoe. In despair, Clytie turned into a sunflower and was doomed to follow the progress of Helios across the sky every day. "She turns, always towards the sun, though her roots hold her fast, and, altered, loves unaltered," according to Ovid. Watts's sculpture captures the moment of her transformation as the sunflower's petals open round her twisting torso. 

We've been somewhat scathing about Edward Burne-Jones in the past, but there's no denying the beauty and effect of this wall hanging he designed for Morris & Co. It depicts a scene from the French medieval allegory of courtly love, the Roman de la Rose. Our hero reaches out to the huge rose with a woman's face at its centre. 

As well as the gorgeous flowers on show, you can't help but marvel at the details such as the nails in the fence and the ironwork on the door. 

The poster image for this show is one of the most over-the-top of Victorian paintings: The Roses of Heliogabalus by Lawrence Alma-Tadema. It's from the collection of the Spanish-Mexican billionaire Juan Antonio Pérez Simón, and we've seen it before at Leighton House in Kensington. 

The teenage 3rd-century Roman emperor Heliogabalus was notorious for his decadence and sexual excesses. Alma-Tadema depicts a banquet at which the emperor is supposed to have suffocated his guests by dropping huge quantities of rose petals on them. It's a bizarre painting; you certainly don't get the feeling that the guests are concerned by their impending doom, though presumably they've just been hit by only the first of many loads of petals. There's a particularly ambivalent expression on the face of the woman at front right, clutching the pomegranate. 

Being showered by rose petals sounds like some Swinging 60s happening, to which you might wear a garish Yves Saint Laurent floral dress. Andy Warhol would have been commissioned to provide the decor, of course. 

But in the 60s, the age of Flower Power wasn't just fun fashion, it had a serious political side, as exemplified by Marc Riboud's 1967 photograph of a participant at an anti-Vietnam War protest in Washington confronting the drawn bayonets of the National Guard with a chrysanthemum. 

And here's a more up-to-date political floral message: Confined to house arrest and deprived of his passport, the dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei began a silent protest in late 2013, placing a fresh bouquet of flowers every day in the basket of a bicycle outside his Beijing studio and posting the image on social media, signalling his continued presence, even if muzzled. He finally got his passport back in mid-2015, and the same year he produced this simple white porcelain replica of the flower-filled basket, rendering his protest permanent.

This is a really wide-ranging show; there are religious images from east and west; precise botanical renderings of plants, such as those by Pierre-Joseph Redouté, and weird and wonderful objets d'art, like the 1880s Worcester Aesthetic Teapot. Among the many beautiful things on display that we'd have loved to take home, if possible, were these 18th-century Chinese vases, every inch of their surfaces covered in the most abundant blooms. Understated but exquisitely charming. 

Surprisingly, there's next to no mention of 17th- and 18th-century Dutch floral still-life painting, but this being the museum of impressionisms, there is a substantial section of the show devoted to pictures of flowers by Impressionists, Post-Impressionists and their contemporaries. Manet, Gauguin, Caillebotte, Renoir and Redon are all here, and so too is Cezanne.    

With the quote of the exhibition: "I have given up on flowers. They wilt straight away. Fruit is more reliable."

Not sure anyone's planning a Fruit Power show anytime soon, though. 

Practicalities 

Flower Power is on at the Musée des impressionnismes in Giverny until January 7. The exhibition is generally open Thursday to Sunday from 1000 to 1800, but see the museum website for extended opening over Christmas and New Year. Full-price tickets are 11 euros, and there's no need to book in advance. We took about 1 3/4 hours to go around the show; some visitors seemed to whizz through in about 20 minutes.  

Vernon-Giverny is the nearest rail station, on the line between Paris and Rouen. If the weather's fine, it's an easy, almost flat walk of about 5 1/2 kilometres from the station to the museum, some of it along the River Seine; if not, there's an infrequent bus service between Vernon and Giverny on weekdays as well as taxis. There's plenty of parking in Giverny if you're travelling by car. 

Images

Jean Broc (1771-1850), The Death of Hyacinth, 1801, Musée Sainte-Croix, Poitiers
George Frederic Watts (1817-1904), Clytie, around 1865-69, Watts Gallery Trust, Compton, Surrey
Morris & Co, after Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898) and John Henry Dearle (1859-1932), The Heart of the Rose, 1901, Badisches Landesmuseum, Karlsruhe 
Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912), The Roses of Heliogabalus, 1888, Pérez Simón Collection, Mexico
Yves Saint Laurent (1936-2008), cocktail dresses, 1966-67, Musée Yves Saint Laurent, Paris, and Andy Warhol (1928-1987), Flowers, 1970, Klüser Collection, Munich
Ai Weiwei (born 1957), Bicycle Basket with Porcelain Flowers, 2015, courtesy of the artist and Neugerriemschneider gallery, Berlin
Anonymous (China), Pair of vases with "thousand flowers" decor, reign of Qianlong (1736-1795), Musée national des arts asiatiques, Paris 
Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), The Blue Vase, 1889-90, Musée d'Orsay, Paris