Tulips Simply Because We Love to Look Flower; They’Ve Been Painted More Than Any a Tulip Was Once the Most Trying to Explain Why We Humans Grow at Them
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JULY 29 2017 ISSUE TULIP ART MANIA! THE EXHIBITION OPENS at THE BOWES MUSEUM Around the beautiful Victorian halls of The Bowes Museum, In this unique Museum created by Joséphine and John Bowes winding up grand staircases into its picture galleries and opulent the familiar tulip becomes un-familiar, as its role in history rooms, tulip artworks have been placed like clues to a treasure hunt chronicles a greater play. When the plot on the world stage or a detective mystery. As a timely and enlightening exhibition gets confusing, we need a simple tale to walk us through it. celebrating 125 years of The Bowes Museum this engaging trail Thus our floral court jester steps through the fourth wall to meanders through the history, culture and science of the last 1000 guide us through our past and help us to understand how to years from Central Asia to Western Europe and back again. navigate our future. PAUL SAKOILSKY, Flower Fool (Kunst Clown series), 2017 HOW TULIP MANIA TRAVELS THROUGH TIME responsible for economic disasters and DID YOU KNOW? revolutions while being revered as a divine Imagine talking to friendly aliens and tulips simply because we love to look flower; they’ve been painted more than any A tulip was once the most trying to explain why we humans grow at them. But that only lasts for a week other flower for their uniqueness, yet are expensive flower in the world! billions of tulips. These flowers are of or so because before you know it the now grown on every continent. Tulipmania A single tulip bulb sold for 5,500 guilders in little use as food or a medicine. Most petals fall off and they die! Then we is an historical fact and a modern reality 1633 – the equivalent of £800,000 today. tulips don’t have a fragrance either, so throw the cut flowers away, or wait – there are dozens of tulip festivals from SEE PAGE 15 we tell our alien visitors that we grow months while the sad-looking plants Japan and Korea to the USA, India and Oops! The name ‘tulip’ is a retreat back into their bulbs. Well, Australia. Even so, no tulip displays are lost-in-translation mistake! that was nice! Same time next spring? quite as massive as those in Holland. When a traveller in Turkey asked what the flower was called, he was told it was atülbent , Our relation with tulips is... Holland inevitably looms large in or turban, which the flower resembles. complicated. Tulips can represent love this tale. It was there that Gavin Turk SEE PAGE 6 and passion as well as the sacrifice of came up with the idea for the Turkish martyrs and the brevity of human life. Tulips exhibition while visiting his artist The Tulip Revolution led to a new government in Kyrgyzstan. It has been both an extravagant luxury friend Philippa van Loon in Amsterdam. Tulips have been central to the Islamic and the cheapest bunch of blooms in The Museum van Loon glories in revolution in Iran since 1979. the supermarket; tulips have been held the arts and ...CONTINUED ON PAGE 2 » SEE PAGE 12 1 » CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 achievements of the Dutch Golden Age, so taking tulip artworks from Britain to CONTENTS be displayed there in spring was perhaps a little crazy: rather like selling coals to TULIPS IN THE EAST Newcastle. But it worked. The tulip is a humble flower that somehow deserves all 4 The Silk Road 7 Tulip stories, myths and legends 8 Persian poetic genius the attention it gets. 9 The Tulip Era in the Ottoman Empire 12 Tulips and Revolution The tulip has been celebrated in 13 The Islamic Golden Age decorative arts too, especially on gorgeous ceramics and textiles, on elegant furniture and Old Master paintings that feature TULIPS IN THE WEST in the wonderful collection of The Bowes 14 Tulips arrive in Europe 15 Tulipmania in Holland 16 Flower-fools and pamphleteers Museum. This Turkish Tulips exhibition 17 Tulipmania in art 18 Cabinets of Curiosity 33 What happened to English tulips? will present the contemporary artworks alongside a trail of beautiful tulip-inspired treasures that wends its way all through the galleries there. The tulip’s tale is also a story about YOUR GUIDE TO WORKS & ARTISTS migration from east to west and about 22 Sir PETER BLAKE 23 HELEN CHADWICK ADAM DANT MAT COLLISHAW how much we owe the middle east 24 DAMIEN HIRST RORY McEWEN LILIANE LIJN 25 SARAH STATON GEORGIE HOPTON ANYA GALLACCIO and central Asia – lands where tulips 26 ADAM DANT 28 CHARLES JONES FIONA BANNER GORDON CHEUNG MICHAEL CRAIG-MARTIN originated and refugees are fleeing 29 GAVIN TURK 30 PHILIPPA Van LOON YINKA SHONIBARE MBE NANCY FOUTS from now – lands steeped in the culture, 31 MUSTAFA HULUSI TOM GALLANT CORNELIA PARKER 32 ROB and NICK CARTER mathematics, science and philosophy of the Islamic Golden Age and the heyday of the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire. THE AESTHETICS OF TULIPS This is also an allegory about 34 The language of flowers 35 Beautiful botanical books 36 Vanitas paintings aesthetics and science; about the beauty 37 Greek mythology and tulips 38 Hungarian tulip folk art of the world, both natural and man- made. The tulip as a symbol connects both – sometimes we can learn the most THE SCIENCE & NATURAL HISTORY OF TULIPS from the humblest of teachers. 39 What are bulbs? 40 Grow your own scented tulips 41 Taxonomy and pollination 42 Commercial tulip production 43 Tulip Breaking Virus TULIPA 44 Atomic gardening and pesticides 45 Tulips from space GAVIN TURKISH ARTISTS & TULIPS A new cultivar 46 Mondrian and great female floral artists 47 Famous tulip art 48 Joséphine Bowes art/flower hybrid 49 WHEN IS A TULIP NOT A TULIP? This limited edition bulb will be available to buy in September as part of our 50 The House of Fairy Tales’ ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS crowdfunding campaign for the ‘Great Turkish 51 TULIPS & GARDENS TIMELINE Tulip Challenge’ education programme for schools. For further information: TULIPS & SPORT [email protected] 52 How to win big playing sports on the Silk Road 2 TULIPS IN THE EAST More than five hundred years before tulips were first seen in western route of world history. It’s very likely that merchants and nomads took Europe, the flowers were cultivated and admired in beautiful Islamic tulip bulbs with them on their journeys, speeding up the natural migration gardens in Persia (now called Iran). Tulips grew wild right across Central of the flowers. Wild tulips flourish in Anatolia (modern Turkey) too; where Asia, blooming alongside the ancient Silk Road, the first major trading nomadic Turkish tribes settled and established the Ottoman Empire. WHERE THE WILD TULIPS ARE TULIPS & THE SILK ROAD MAJOR ROUTES of the SILK ROAD THE MARITIME SPICE ROUTES WHERE WILD TULIPS GROW It is ironic that Europe’s most The Tian Shan are known as the Pamir-Alai Mountains and from there Bounded by deserts to the south low-lying and flat country should Celestial Mountains by the Chinese, as further west towards the Hindu Kush and the Atlantic to the west, there was now be so closely associated with the they are so enormously high that they and Turkmenistan. Almost certainly they nowhere else to go that had the cold world’s favourite mountain flower. reach up to Heaven. They may look were helped on their way by nomadic winters that tulips require. That was until Wild tulips first appeared in the remote celestial from a distance, but there’s tribes and merchants who were also human beings began to cherish these and desolate mountains of central Asia. nothing heavenly about their fierce, travelling along the Silk Route to reach flowers that welcomed the spring and The Tian Shan Mountains range across freezing winters that drag on into April Persia (modern Iran) and the Caucasus, heralded the summer, and to appreciate the borders between northwest China, or temperatures that sear the tulips’ which we now know as Turkey. Their their beautiful and unpredictable blooms. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, and the leaves in the summer, forcing the flowers westward migration continued into These were usually red but could also be tulips that grew there were hardy, ground- to retreat back into their bulbs. the Balkans and skirted all around the lemon-yellow, white or amber. With a hugging plants with short stems that could The tulips spread south and east into Mediterranean to Spain before somehow little help from humans, tulips were about withstand snowdrifts and high winds. Kashmir and the Himalayas, but mostly straddling the Straits of Gibraltar to to conquer the rest of the world... they moved westwards, first into the reach the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. 3 TULIPS IN THE EAST TRADING PLACES For two thousand years the world’s richest and most important trade routes were the ‘Silk Roads’ across Asia and the Indian Ocean. In the 21st century the ‘New Silk Road’ is likely to be just as significant… Every spring for hundreds of years, as snowdrifts melted and merchants set out to travel with their spices and luxury goods, they must have noticed myriad little tulips blooming in mountain meadows. We cannot be certain, but it’s highly likely that travellers often took tulip seeds or bulbs with them on their journeys, helping the wild flowers to spread more rapidly. The Silk Roads weren’t really roads made of silk, were they? Er, no. The Silk Roads is a modern name given to a network of trade routes that stretched 4,500 miles (7240km) right across the mountains and steppes of GO EAST, YOUNG MAN! Marco Polo’s camel caravan crossing the mountains of Afghanistan, illustrated in the Catalan Atlas produced in 1375 Asia from China to the Mediterranean.