FLOR.ILEGIUM

MFA thesis paper

Monica Tap

April 9, 1996 Introduction

It's a curious tendency. If you ask someone to illustrate the concept "a painting," chances are they will rough-in a daisy shape or two, maybe add a vase and then frame it with a rectangle. A flower painting, (historically at the lowest end of the image hierarchy), has somehow become the visual shorthand for all painting.

When I entered the MFA program in September 1994, I did not expect that a 300 year old flower painting would become the catalyst for my thesis work. That,however, is exactly what happened. The paintings in my thesis exhibition conclude a year-long investigation of six flower paintings by the seventeenth-century Dutch artist, Rachel Ruysch that began after I saw one of her works in an art history text.

Focusing on Ruysch's work and my relationship to it, I was led down a garden path strewn with questions. What is the relationship of the historical work of art to the present day, and how is it relevant? What can be learned from the particular genre of seventeenth century Dutch floral still life? How did an image that once signified mortality end up on so much wallpaper? Who was Ruysch and why isn't her work better known? Can appropriation be employed as a reconstructive as well as deconstructive tool? And, given the most recent post-mortems on painting issued by the avatars of high technology, why choose to paint at all?

Painting is hard to describe in words. In my experience, studio production is messy and unpredictable in more than just the material sense. I think of what I do as a kind of "pure research," that is, exploration unfettered by a fixed destination. Jasper Johns once said, "Sometimes I see it and then I paint it. Other times, I paint it and then I see it." This is the best description of painting I've ever found. Not only did one painting lead to another, but what I was learning about Dutch still life painting also found its way into the work. Studio visits and group discussions, as well as trips to Amsterdam and New York, are part of the mix of painting, history, looking and questioning that led to the finished paintings.

To keep things clear ( clearer than they were while making the work) I have divided this paper into three sections. First, an introduction to Ruysch and her historical context; second, a description of my own production in response to her work; and third, some thoughts on rummaging about in the past as a legitimate task for contemporary painting. 2

Rachel Rusych and the Baroque flower piece

11••• the life of man is nothing other than the flower of the field which quickly jades,, z

Rachel Ruysch, in spite of her renown in the 17th and 18th centuries, has largely fad~d from memory. She was born in Amsterdam in 1664, daughter of a professor of anatomy and botany. She apprenticed to the celebrated flower painter, Willem van Aeslt ( 1627-82), and by the age of nineteen was already very accomplished. In 1693 she married the portrait painter, Juriaen Pool, with whom she entered the Guild in the Hague in 1701. From 1708 to 1716 she was Court Painter to Elector Johann Willem van de Palts in Dusseldorf. Her achievement as a painter is all the more remarkable when one considers that she also bore and raised ten children. 2

For the first twenty five years of her career, Ruysch worked within the accepted conventions of the 17th-century flower piece. Her exceptional technical skills, however, distinguished her from other painters. By exploiting the rules of composition, colour theory and perspective she created pictures that were not only realistic, but also powerfully theatrical. Dramatic lighting signified life and death oppositions, insects alluded to the fugitive nature of this world, and wilted flowers and decaying fruit emphasized mortality. Her early pictures were loaded with allegorical significance.

After 1710 her work changed from the dark backgrounds of the 17th-Century idiom to a flatter, more decorative style. Together with her contemporary Jan van Huysum, Ruysch was responsible for authoring this, the last significant innovation in the genre of the floral still life. Their new pictures were brighter in both hue and value, their compositions more formal than symbolic. The shallow space and layout of these paintings broke with the tradition that favored the portrayal of three dimensional space above all else.

Illusionism was at the heart of Dutch still life painting. Seventeenth-century Dutch art theory stated that the aim of art was to deceive the eye and produce a convincing illusion of reality. Paul Taylor states in his book, Dutch Flower Painting, "One of the great insights of seventeenth-century Dutch art was that accurate description did not make for convincing illusion, that in order to translate from three dimensions to two, reality had to be transposed by a set of artificial rules."3 "[T]he painters

Isweert, Emmanuel. Florilegiu111, (I6I2). quoted in Paul Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting, 1600-1720. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995, p.43 Sweert's Florilegiu111 was a floral sales catalogue that contained both detailed engravings of his floral wares and biblical quotes that referred to flowers. One wonders if he saw no contradiction in advertising expensive goods by referring to. the futility of earthly wealth. 2 Soth,by's Old Master Paintings. (catalogue) London, Wednesday 6th July, I994. p.52 3Taylor,. p.188 3 never saw the bouquets they painted, since the bouquets never existed." 4 Books like Gerhard de Lairesse's Groot Schilderboek (Big Book of Painting) contained specific instructions to assist the painter to fool her audience. Such theory was more than merely practical; it was crucial for a genre concerned with the careful "rendering" of a non-existent still life.

For flower painters, the situation was anything but a bed of roses. To begin with, flowers were outrageously expensive in the Golden Age. At the height of the speculative frenzy of Tulipomania, paintings of flowers were cheaper than the flowers themselves. 5 In addition, flowers wilted and faded faster than the artists could paint them. Furthermore, as arrangements almost always included flowers that bloomed in different seasons, it was impossible to work from a complete bouquet. Consequently, the realism of the finished picture owed more to the study of composition and colour than it did to direct observational painting. By consulting books of botanical engravings, 6 copying other paintings and drawing inexpensive plants in season, flower painters created hyper-realistic pictures that were a triumph of trickery.

Hidden within this painterly realism was a rich allegorical language. From the human skull in a vanitas picture to the wilting flowers, rotting fruit and buzzing insects of the flower piece, all were emblematic of the impermanence of life and worldly fortune. 'Just as flowers wither, so do the hopes of all those who wish to rise through society without the blessing of the lord."7 Psalm 103, verse 15 conveyed a specific moral message: "Beauty, riches, pomp, joy, art and the fame of majesty, indeed all things that are worldly, pass like a flower." The moral content of the Baroque flower piece was based on the allegorical reading of the cycle of bud into blossom, of ripeness to decay.

Seventeenth-century allegorists viewed.history as a "process of relentless disintegration."8 This is hardly surprising given the political unrest which marked that century. Holland was in a peculiar situation, however, as a prosperous and relatively stable country. Simon Schama in his book, The Embarrassment of Riches, describes the quandary faced by the Dutch: how to reconcile earthly wealth with moral righteousness. Flower painters took advantage of this dilemma. Artists began to create

4 ibid. p.I95 5 A single bulb was once sold for fl.I3,000 --more than the price of a farm .. Live flower arrangements were not a common feature in Dutch homes due to both the high price of flowers and the sca~city of land on which to cultivate them. Far from the commonplace it is today, for the Dutch person in the Golden age , a vase of flowers could be an object "with an allure of heady luxury and faintly delicious wickedness." Taylor, p.38 6The Florilegiu111 Novum (I6I2)by Nicolas de Bry, for example, contains I I2 hand coloured engravings of various flowers, each depicted from several different angles. I examined this wonderful old book at the Rijksbibliotheek in Amsterdam this winter. Florilegium means "book of flowers." 7Taylor, p.I4 8Buck-Morss, Susan. Th, Dialectics ef Seeing. Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge MA and London UK: MIT Press, I989.p.I6I 4

easel-sized pictures for the wealthy merchant class when religious commissions evaporated in the wake of the Reformation. The floral still life was well suited to this new market. It conveniently embodied notions of morality and piety in a beautiful, and desirable, picture of an extravagant bouquet

If the paintings were extravagant, so was their symbolism. Flowers became overloaded with meanings. The rose, for example, symbolized the Virgin Mary, who was associated with the rosary, while its thorns recalled the passion of Christ. The rose also spoke of voluptuousness and earthly love, an association of pain with pleasure (the thorns, again) and, more soberly, the transience of life. It metaphorically described a lover's complexion, mouth, or breast. Simultaneously, a flower could be a token of affection and reminder of mortality, a symbol of opulence and caution against excess, an emblem of purity and a sign of immodesty. Susan Buck-Morss described it this way: "The impulse for a systematic completion of knowledge [in the Baroque still life] came up against a semiotic arbitrariness ... one and the same object can be ... just as easily a virtue as a vice, and even tu ally everything can signify everything ... g

The piles of contradictory messages heaped onto the Baroque flower piece led to the impossibility of its signifying anything at all. In the 20th century, this state of meaninglessness, produced by an overabundance of allegorical signification, has been identified by Walter Benjamin as a prerequisite for an object's commodification. The absence of specific meaning leaves a hole that advertising rushes in to fill: the new aura "eases its passage into the dream world of the private consumer." 10 It seems incongruous to refer to advertising and the Baroque in the same sentence until one considers that Golden Age Holland was a merchant society and artists were free agents, producers of luxury goods. The floral still life, heavy with overdetermined symbolism, was ripe for commodification. It slipped quietly back into pattern and decoration. It looked good and it no longer signified anything nasty or morbid.

The breakdown of meaning in the Baroque still life could be seen as similar to the breakdown of meaning in our own time. Deconstruction and postmodern attitudes have destabilized meaning and contributed to the uncertainty of the late 20th century. In response to this disturbing sense of being adrift, painting can be a way to anchor oneself within a tradition, not out of nostalgia, but from a critical understanding of history. Walter Benjamin alludes to this when he talks about a "secret agreement between past generations and the present one," namely, that "our coming was expected on earth."11

9 Ibid., p. I 73 I OT bid., p. I 84 I 1Benjamin, Walter, quoted in Wolin, Richard. Walter Benjamin. An Aesthetic ef Redemption. New York: Columbia University Press, !982. 5

Studio Work

"Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably .. 11 l 2

I first began to reference Ruysch after chancing upon a reproduction of her work in aq art history class. I was surprised that a flower painting would catch my attention. After all, I had spent the previous four years painting pictures of rundown taverns, dirty beer glasses and rural diners. But I was getting bored of these interiors, becoming increasingly suspicious of the ease with which the pictures became commodities. Also, I was beginning to wonder if that subject would be better served by photography. Rusych's dramatic still life had a sense of potential that excited me. By working with the floral still life I could employ a more expressive paint handling without having to sacrifice my interest in light and representation. Moreover, this opened the way to conversations with the past and with painting. If the paintings of interiors had been a way to locate myself in place, Canada, then here was a way to locate myself, as a woman of Dutch heritage and as a painter, in painting.

My work of the last year is based on six reproductions of flower paintings by Ruysch. I use both colour photocopies and slides from the NSCAD slide library as reference. Appropriation and the use of reproductions are relevant to this work because they allow me to critique modernist notions of originality ('erasing' myself as author by reworking another's compositions, and distancing myself from the original by using multiple generations of reproduction.) Appropriation and reproduction are also relevant because, as we saw in part one, the floral still life was itself a veritable collage of flowers appropriated from other paintings and copied from commercially available reproductions. Like Ruysch, I have not been involved in painting flowers, but in painting paintings of flowers, albeit on 20th century terms.

Just as I was beginning this project I was summoned home to Edmonton because my father was very ill. He died a week later. When I returned to school, the eloquent language of mortality in Ruysch's floral still lifes took on new significance. Cut flowers had threatened to overwhelm both the hospital room and my parents' home, revealing a floral symbolism that has persisted into the present.

The first works on this theme were exhibited in the Anna Leonowens Gallery in August, 1995.

p.2IS . 12Benjamin, Walter. "Theses on the Philosophy of History", quoted in Craig Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodemism." (!980) in Art in Theory 1900-1990. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds. Oxford UK & Cambridge USA: Blackwell. I992, p.!052 6

They arose from a desire to use the Baroque's allegorical language of mortality and loss. One was a triptych made of three expressively painted copies of the same reproduction. The colour and paint handling in each alluded to three stages of an aging bouquet: fullness, over ripeness and decay. In a second work I divided a photocopied reproduction into four quadrants and carefully reproduced each quadrant on a separate canvas. I hung these in a row to challenge the viewer to reconcile a whole from the disjointed but evidently related parts.

The remaining works in the exhibition were two large (7' x5') monochromatic paintings. My concern here was to try to represent invisibility and transition. I thought that by draining the composition of colour and contrast I could arrive at a less obviously Baroque metaphor for death. Some visitors to the exhibition commented that they saw the monochromes as allusions to the "end of painting," that is, as a visual expression of the idea that paintings can no longer communicate meaningfully. In another reading entirely, I noticed that by removing colour to evoke mortality, I had inadvertently made paintings that began to resemble wallpaper. How had it happened that an image so loaded with melancholic reminders of death in one age could be reduced to visual muzak in another?

Flowers, it seemed, led a double life. They were a popular motif in the decorative arts long before the 1700s, and no doubt continued to serve that purpose even as the Baroque era loaded them with allegorical significance. Was it a coincidence that a much simplified version of the standard floral composition appeared on Delft tiles soon after the first floral still life paintings appeared in 1604? Or that the central cluster of flowers from later paintings is echoed in the ornament_al borders of eighteenth-century Aubusson carpets? It is disconcerting how rapidly the formal language of the Baroque flower piece was re-colonized by decorators. What conditions had made this possible?

In my studio I responded to this problem by resolving to visually deconstruct Ruysch's work. Having concluded that the Dutch still life was not what it seemed, I wanted to see what it was. To this end, I cropped the center from four Ruysch compositions and painted each onto a 22" square. This eliminated surrounding space, flattened the images and enhanced their decorativeness The viewer could compare them and note the repetition of certain flowers and their placement. These paintings looked so much like upholstery that I referred to them as "cushion paintings." But I wanted to do more than illustrate their decorative quality. I wanted to pull the work completely apart. The paintings in my thesis exhibition are various manifestations of this deconstructive, or destructive, urge.

I began by making what I thought of as an "inventory" of the elements in Ruysch's compositions. I 7 had two goals: to reveal her structural blueprint and to place all the flowers from four of her arrangements onto one canvas. To accomplish this, I layered one composition over top of another by projecting a different slide onto the canvas on four consecutive evenings and painting from the projection. The first picture made this way looked nothing like an inventory, nor did it look remotely systematic. If anything it bore a family resemblance to Abstract Expressionis.m in its apparent use of a gestural, expressive mark. This was surprising - a methodical means that led to an expressive end. This paradox reminded me of the "inauthenticity" of the Dutch floral still life where the illusion of observed reality is constructed of artifice.

I continued to use the same six slides to fulfill different formal programs. I worked large, (7'x 5'), in order to distance my work from Ruysch's easel-size pictures and to make room for the ironic allusion to wallpaper. In the spirit of quasi-scientific investigation, I isolated the foliage on one canvas and the flowers on another. I composed one painting by projecting the slides so that the central flowers were in vertical alignment. The next painting was based on a horizontal alignment. I employed different codes of representation (linear, realistic, blurry, etc.) for different slides or portions thereof. The work became equal parts investigation and arrangement, a kind of mapping of a historically discounted space.

The "overlay" paintings described above are dense, layered and almost abstract. The repetition and layering change the flowers from an iconically loaded image to an arbitrary sign, an arabesque of paint. One studio visitor said that the paintings reminded her of what linguists call "saturation": when you repeat a word to the point where it loses meaning, the phonetic dissociates from the symbolic. That fit the overlay paintings and captured my own sense of saturation vis a vis my six reference slides. But there was more to the pictures, and it related back to history.

The allegorists heaped emblematic images one on top another, as if the sheer quantity of meanings could compensate for their arbitrariness and lack of coherence. The result is that nature, far from an organic whole, appears in arbitrary arrangement, as a lifeless, fragmentary, untidy clutter of emblems. 13

Susan Buck-Morss' description of the Baroque image of nature could be applied almost verbatim to the overlay paintings.

My program has been twofold. On the one hand, I have sought to re inscribe some meaning into this subject by re-presenting it using the "meaningful" language of the painterly gesture. On the other hand, by tying this painterly mark to a systematic, task-oriented approach, I can maintain the

I3Buck-Morss p.I73 8

detached position of the investigator, the archeologist.

In his essay on the allegorical impulse in postmodernism, Craig Owens connects the repetitive task-oriented work of Hanne Darboven and Sol Lewit to allegory. He identifies the .concern with "structure as sequence, .. static, ritualistic, repetitive," as an allegorical impulse arising from "the common practice of allegory to pile up fragments ceaselessly without any strict idea of a goal."14 While this relates closely to the method of the overlay paintings, the works themselves do not disclose their process any more than the floral still life reveals its artifice.

At issue here is the quality of the mark I use in painting. In the pendulum's arc from meaning to meaninglessness, the painterly mark holds fast to meaning. Mary Kelly, in her essay "Re­ Viewing Modernist Criticism," identifies the gestural mark as problematic because it is an essential element in the commodification of the art object.15 It signifies authenticity, originality and creativity - all good selling_ features (as many eighties' painters would discover, proving her point.)

In spite of Kelly's warning, the authentic mark plays a critical role in my painting. A sense of history and melancholy is embedded in the work when I use a historically-determined vocabulary to deconstruct historical imagery. It allows me to subvert the puritanical, scientific and objective descriptiveness of the Baroque flower piece by employing an apparently subjective, sensual handling. Finally, the gestural mark opposes the mass-produced, machine-made regularity of printed flowers endlessly repeated on wallpapers and fabrics. My task to date has been less to make ironic comment upon the past than to attempt to reconstitute it as part of a meaningful dialogue with the present. It was more appropriate to embody what was lost rather than simply allude to its passing.

I4Benjamin, Walter, quoted in Owens, p.I054 15Kelly, Mary. Re-Viewing Moder~ist Criticism. in Art After Modernism. Rethinking Representation, Brian Wallis, ed. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art with David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc., I984. p.90-9! 9

Conclusion

The act ef redemptive critique is therefore a work ef remembrance: it is a process ef preserving the truth content or Idea ef a work from the ever­ tbreatening forces ef social amnesia to which humanity bas over the ages become inured. l 6

Things seen and not looked at, not examined.} 7 Jasper Johns

Images of flowers, as much as Johns's flags or targets, fit the category of things seen and not looked at. Floral imagery, found on everything from couches to diaper bags, disappears by virtue of its ubiquity. In a time when "baroque" is synonymous to "flowery" and both equate to "bombast," who would not prefer to see it fade? But look again. The flower painting is like a fossil that "marks the survival of past history within the present."18 The floral pattern of decor is a discarded fetish that in its hollowed-out form colonizes the present with the blank stare of the dead. This is partly why Ruysch's work is worthy of remembrance.

There is another reason to take Ruysch's work seriously today. To ask why she has been almost forgotten is to question how and by whom history is written. Her name has disappeared from all but feminist revisions of art history. In the past, women were much more likely to be painted than be painters, and it is galling that both positions guaranteed them anonymity.

Her odds of making it into the official record were further diminished by her choice to paint flowers. Her male contemporaries, also, are scarcely mentioned in most books. What's more, the genre ranked low even in the seventeenth century. Flower painters suffered because their work apparently required only technical skill, they painted inanimate objects (believed to have less "soul" than animate ones) and they supposedly worked from "life", that is, they painted things without idealization, which was the province of history and mythology painters.19 As a woman and as a flower painter, Rachel Ruysch was doubly fated to obscurity.

Three hundred years later, sitting in a studio full of "flower paintings," I wonder how much has changed. And how can my work contribute to the discussion? Reffering to the work of a marginalized painter, I question how women have been marginalized in painting. Aligning myself with an artist who was the equal of her male contemporaries, I present the argument from a position of strength. Appropriating Ruysch's work for my own purpose effectively dislodges her work

I 6wolin. p.45 I7Johns, quoted in Yau, p.I32 I8Benjamin, quoted in Buck-Morss, p.I60 I 9T aylor, p.83 1 0 from textbooks, airs it out, and circulates her name in a new context. Introducing the motif of flowers into what look like abstract expressionist paintings pokes fun at the machismo of that movement. Adopting procedures from conceptual art keeps the work on track as an archeological dig in a Baroque flower garden. Enacting formalist variations on an image antithetical to Greenberg's credo against representation and, especially, decoration, gives me great s;itisfaction. Employing all manner of distancing devices (reproductions, slide projections, systemic layouts) to create works that are about pleasure and paint is a paradox I relish.

Henri Lefebvre states that "with the advent of modernity time has vanished from social space .... Our time, this most essential part of lived experience, this greatest of all goods is no longer visible to use, no longer intelligible."20 Painting can recuperate a sense of lost time. By employing a visual rather than linear logic, fragments of history can be dislodged from their "all to familiar, taken for granted ... context, and effectively montaged into a new setting, ... one which would not fuse their integrities, but allow them to coexist on the same plane in the same time."21 (my italics.)

The paintings in my thesis exhibition are my clearest response to the question of painting's relevance today. If the language of painting is as lost to us as the emblematic language of Baroque flower pictures, then my paintings are an expression of loss and a record of my desire to invoke coherence and meaning, aware of the impossibility of such retrieval. But if history is not necessarily linear, if it spirals back upon itself and weaves around attempts to constrain it, then the door is open for doubt.

Nothing is over.

20Lefebvre, Henri ( The Production of Space) quoted in GREGORY, Derek. Geographical Imaginations. Cambridge MA & Oxford UK: Blackwell, I 994. p.366 2IBuck-Morss, p.2I8 1 1

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BUCK-MORSS, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing. Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge MA and London UK: MIT Press, 1989.

FERGUSON, Russell, ed. Hand-Painted Pop. American Art in Transition 1955-62. Los Angeles, New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1992.

GREGORY, Derek. Geographical Imagi,nations. Cambridge MA & Oxford UK: Blackwell, 1994.

HARVEY, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge MA & Oxford UK: Blackwell, 1989.

KOSUTH, Joseph. "Art After Philosophy, I and II." in Idea Art, Gregory Battcock, ed. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc. 1973.

OWENS, Craig. "The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism." (1980) in Art and Theory 1900-1990. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds. Oxford UK and Cambridge MA: Blackwell, 1992.

SCHAMA, Simon. The Embarrassment of Riches. An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. Berkley and Los Angeles USA; London UK: University of California Press, 1988.

STEIN, Judith E. and Ann Sargent Wooster. "Making Their Mark" in Making Their Mark. Women Artists Move into the Mainstream, 1970-85. Nancy Grubb, ed. New York: Abbeville Press, 1989.

TAYLOR, Paul. Dutch Flower Painting 1600-1720. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995.

WALLIS, Brian, ed. Art After Modernism. Rethinking Representation. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art with David R.Godine, Publisher, Inc. 1984.

WOLIN, Richard. Walter Benjamin. An Aesthetic of Redemption. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.