Wonderful potpourri
Laura Gascoigne
Flower Power Millennium Galleries. Sheffield until 25 August
o years ago, after Michael Landy's rspectacular destruction of all his worldly possessions on a conceptual bonfire of the vanities in an empty branch of C&A on Oxford Street, the art world waited agog for his next move. A final act is a tough one to follow. Landy followed it
earlier this year with an exhibition of etchings of urban weeds.
There are artistic precedents for this — Leonardo and Diirer, to name but two — but they're not appropriate for a conceptual artist. 'What's new on the cutting edge?' 'Botanicals, mate.' The critics could have laughed, but instead Landy's botanicals were splashed all over the January issue of Tate magazine. It's official, was the message: flowers are back, and their rehabilitation is currently being celebrated in a timely show at Sheffield's new Millennium Galleries.
Despite its title, Flower Power is a serious, if eclectic, exhibition. A joint venture with Norwich Castle Museum, generously funded by Sainsbury's, it tackles a vast subject with breezy aplomb. Apart from a starting date of the 15th century, no limits of medium, time or place are set on its selection. The only entry qualification for the 130 exhibits from major British museums, libraries and private collections is that they come with flowers. A brave decision, curatorially, with the advantage that — unlike in some recent themed exhibitions in national museums — there has been no need to resort to fillers It's all good stuff.
The result is a wonderful potpourri of objects loosely gathered under the usual specious headings — 'The Flowers of Faith', 'Cut & Still', 'Love and Death' etc. — in an attempt to make the whole thing look educational. There are exquisite plant studies on vellum by Nicolas Robert, botanical artist to Louis XIV, and 'paper rnosaicks' by the 18th-century collagist Mrs Mary Delany. There are books of botanical prints, including John Gerard's seminal 16th-century Herbal of 1,800 woodcuts and Robert Thornton's doomed publishing venture The Temple of Flora, which foundered when the Napoleonic Wars diverted subscribers' funds 'to pay armed men to diffuse rapine, fire and murder, over civilised Europe'. There are floral bouquets in every style and mood, from the formal exuberance of Monnoyer and Van Huysum to the heady intimacy of Fantin-Latour and the innocent freshness of Cedric Morris. There are flowers symbolising purity, like the white lily in Lorenzo Lotto's `Virgin and Child with St Jerome and St Nicholas of Tolentino', and sexuality, like the pink roses in Caravaggio's 'Boy Bitten by a Lizard'. And there are flower girls of every type and class, from Edward Poynter's smouldering Lillie Langtry suggestively toying with the affections of two roses to William Orpen's `Lottie of Paradise Walk', dirty brown hands clutching her flower basket and impudent profile discreetly shaded by a second-hand hat.
That's just the paintings. Flowers also feature on tapestries and embroideries — including a piece of petitpoint allegedly stitched by Mary Queen of Scots — couture by Norman flartnell and Hussein Chalayan, marquetry, ironwork, jewellery, hair ornaments, engraved glass, cutlery and ceramics ranging from a 16th-century Turkish Iznik dish to Richard Slee's kitsch memorial to Princess Diana in the shape of a lustre-glazed bouquet (age will not wither, though you wish it would). Exemplary captions guide us through the tangle of vegetation without ever quite succeeding in unravelling its meanings. Saying it with flowers is not as simple as it sounds. If columbines can symbolise Christ's Passion and Redemption in the 15th century and adultery and cuckoldry in the next, as the catalogue tells us, it's clear we can't trust them further than we can throw them. Reluctantly, co-curator Andrew Moore eventually concedes that 'in some instances a rose is still just a rose'.
The one constant in floral symbolism, of course, is vanity — a hardy perennial now fortified by genetic modification that continues to preoccupy the present generation. Contemporary environmental anxieties inevitably surface in works such as Matt Collishaw's 'Infectious Flowers II' (1997), a series of photographic transparencies of fin-de-siècle fleurs du mal in which cancers of the tongue have been digitally grafted onto orchids. This is the flower as symbol of mourning for the death of nature itself.
But as David Romberg, who took up flower painting in the war, once observed to Josef Herman over the wail of sirens, `Even flowers can be painted so as to remind us of all the terrors in the human breast.'
It's reassuring, in the circumstances, to see from the Carrara herbal that the common violet looks the same today as in the 1390s and still more encouraging, on leaving the exhibition, to find the ugly red brick planters outside Sheffield Hallam University Science Park invaded by poppies, hawkweed and thistles, their pyracanthas choked by rampant goose grass. Superweeds in the making? Possibly, but still as wild as on Dtirer's 'Great Piece of Turf' and exulting in a power over the built environment as enduring as over the artistic imagination.
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