The Art Galleries, Look at All Those Roses

The Art Galleries, Look at All Those Roses

A New Yorker review of the exhibit "Magic of Flowers in Paintings" benefiting the Lenox Hill Association

April 24th, 1954

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THE ART GALLERIES

Look at All Those Roses

Well this week we're again confronted with a group of big shows. One of these, the Vuillard retrospective, at the Museum of Modern Art, is a really massive undertaking, with some hundred and fifty oils, water colors, drawings, and other items; and the others -- a loan showing of paintingsof flowers, for the benefit of the Lenox Hill Neighborhood Association, at the Wildenstein, and a selection of oils from the Brooklyn Museum's American collections, at Knoedler -- though not in this impressive category, are still sizeable. I found the Wildenstein affair, to begin with it, a little disappointing. An exhibition of flower paintings seemed just the thing for the cajoling spring weather we were having the day I went up to the gallery, and I'm not entirely sure why the show didn't live up to my expectations. I think the size if one factor, however. An array of no less than eighty-five pictures all on one subject, and that a restricted one, can easily become monotonous, and the effect is heightened in this case by the fact that the selection is unimaginative, or at least circumscribed. With a seriousness that is at times almost grim, it's held to flowers and nothing else -- no figures, not even subsidiary ones, and little background relief of any other kind; in short, just flowers. And as these are capable of only a limited variety of arrangements, in vases, in jugs, on tables, on shelves, against a wall, against a window -- well, you see what I'm getting at.
The range in time is wide, however, from a tiny, immaculate "Vase of Flowers," by the sixteenth-century German artist Ludger Tom Ring, to a group by Derain, Dali, Rouault, and other contemporaries, and if one skips, or flits, about one can find plenty of appetizing pieces, I was charmed by Gauguin's large, calm "Flowers of Tahiti," Cézanne's "Vase of Flowers," Monet's blue "Nympheas," and, going farther back, the Abraham Breughel "Spring Flowers" and the Adriaen Van der Spelt "Flowerpiece," both of the seventeenth century. I was also, I must admit, delighted by some of the big set pieces that have thoughtfully been included. I'll cite only two, the early eighteenth-century "Flowers in Vase," by Gaspar Verbruggen -- a riot of blooms, tendrils, sprigs, fallen petals, and whatnot -- and the even more luxuriant "Vase of Flowers in a Niche," by a follower of the seventeenth-century jean-Baptiste Monnoyer. There's a whole roomful of these wonderful creations for your enjoyment.