Flowers and Gardens (1982) | From the Vaults

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the art of flowers and the flowering art coexist in exquisite harmony. Author of Metropolitan Flowers, Everett Fahey. The more I look at works of art and the more I learn about gardening, the more I see how closely they've been tied to one another. The people who took an interest in horticulture were the very people who were patronizing artists. The two go together. Former Met curator of European paintings, now director of the Frick Collection, Everett Fahey. If you were interested in looking at flower paintings at the Metropolitan Museum, probably this masterpiece by Manet would be one of the last that you would begin with. The paradox is that Manet incorporates flowers in a very important way in this picture of a woman with a parrot. The model was a famous one that Manet used earlier for his shocking picture of the Desjardins Solerbe, where she appeared as a naked woman with several men having a picnic outdoors. Here she stands in Manet's studio and in a way it would have been almost shockingly modern to see her in the contemporary style of wearing a dress without the crinoline underneath. The model looks out at us and she holds different objects and they actually are the key to the meaning of the painting. If you begin down in the lower right-hand corner with the orange, you have the sense of taste. And then moving up higher, the parrot is a sense of sound. And then the woman actually holds in her left hand a monocle, which would symbolize sight. And finally, for the sense of smell, the small bouquet of violets, which she holds in her right hand and sniffs as she looks out at us. This was actually quite a commonplace habit to carry violets. Back in Paris in the 1860s, this wouldn't have seemed at all unusual because the streets so often were quite smelly with horse-drawn carriages. The flowers had a very special meaning when they were painted. Generally on a Saturday or a Sunday, between 20,000 to 30,000 people in one given day here. To greet them with flowers, and unusual flowers, is kind of a nice gift. For well over a decade, Chris Giftos has been responsible for the design and execution of all of the Met's floral displays, including the weekly change in the Great Hall. There's certain limitations here. As you can see, this is a two-tier container. This is the secret of the Great Hall arrangement. You're cheating. You're getting double height here. If I was to stick one flower in here, a lily, it would only get this high. But because of the two-tier container, we could go this high with it because of the vast space in this Great Hall. Most of these flowers that you see here are from Holland. They were put on a plane and arrived here at 9 o'clock in the morning. Well, the way I start here, it's all mathematics, is to get the height of the arrangement and the sides. There were two ladies here the other day, and they walked in and they mentioned that they have never seen such beautiful artificial flowers in their lives. And one woman says, I don't think they're artificial. I'll touch. And she touched, and she turned to her friend. She goes, yes, they are artificial. And there was a staff member standing next to her and said, no, they are real. And then they touched again. They did take her word for it that it was real. This arrangement changes face every single day, that on Thursdays, sometimes you have to pull some flowers out. Sometimes the lilies open up, so you have to leave room for the arrangement to breathe. I always work with one type of flower, then jump into the next type of flower. I don't pick up three pieces of forsythia and then two heliconias and two ester lilies and then go back to the forsythia. I work everything out. There's 20 stems of forsythia in there for the foundation. And there's 15 heliconias, and there's 15 ester lilies going in now. So I know exactly how many flowers I have to balance off the arrangement all around. This is a, one of, another favorite flower is called the Alstroemerian lily. And it comes in about five or six different colors. And it just gives it a more feathery appearance. When you mix so many different types of flowers, it makes it a very rich bouquet and a very full bouquet. And when all those flowers open, it does look like a Dutch painting. Now this is the last flower that gets into the arrangement. And remember, tomorrow and the next day when you come back, all these lily heads and the forsythia and Alstroemerians will open. And the arrangement is going to get bigger, more colorful, lush looking. And possibly on Thursday, some flowers will have to be taken out because you want the bouquet to be very airy as possible. And that's basically how your great hall arrangement is done. On the northern reaches of Manhattan Island, overlooking the Hudson River, stands the Cloisters. This branch museum of the Met was designed to create a setting for a unique collection of medieval art. Horticulturist of the Cloisters Gardens is Susan Leach. I'd like to welcome you all to the garden this morning. I take care of the Bonafant herb garden, which has 300 plants that are native European plants. All Western European plant material. These were plants grown and used in Western Europe during the Middle Ages. There are no living examples of medieval gardens, so you have to rely on what you see in the art. You take example of the plant of St. Gall, which is in Switzerland. You do see within this plant a vegetable garden, all tightly together. There are beds that are rectangular in shape, and one plant growing per square, per rectangular space. A medicinal garden would be growing in a different area, right next to the physician's place where he would make up all the drugs. And so everything is very intricately planned out. A little later on, there was a beautiful manuscript done by a man named Pietro de Crescentis. And in this particular manuscript, you see a very beautiful border on the manuscript with beautiful little plants, all different kinds of plants along the border. And in the interior are pictures of a duke being instructed by a gardener on how to grow gardens. Now, he also got into the complete detail that you can't grow your trees too close together, because spiders will jump from tree to tree to tree, stringing their webs through the trees, and people walking through will catch their faces in the spider webs, and that just won't do. You can look out at this garden and see the purples and the pretty colors and yellows and whatnot, but not only do these plants have certainly their cultural needs and their whole garden stories, but you can get into it in terms of their medicinal, their folklore, their religious, and that is equally as important because these plants are telling stories. So it's a lot of fun. And they also thought that if you took the juices of this plant and applied it to a wart, it would totally rid the wart. But it's quite a unique plant. It's in the mustard family, you can see by these long seeds, and even if you break up the seed pod, quite a bit of juice does come out from it. So that's one here. This is selendine. I'll just show you this one here. Do you know this plant? It comes up early in the spring, pretty purple, pink flower, all tall spike. It's a shade plant. It's called lungwort or Latin name pulmonaria officinalis. Now this was also in Doctrine of Signatures saying that this, by the shape, would look like the lung and therefore be a cure for any respiratory diseases. Of all the French Impressionist painters, it's Monet that we associate with flowers. Not only did he paint some of the most beautiful canvases of flowers, but he was a gardener and a quite avid one. And in early years, he sowed seed near the houses that he would rent and gathered in bouquets which he painted. In later years, he made enough money to actually build a quite large garden of his own. The canvases in the Metropolitan Museum are remarkable in that they reveal his working practice. He would bring in bouquets and set them on tables and not make a botanically accurate portrayal of them. They're always very loosely painted with his characteristic brush stroke. It's only when you stand back from them that you recognize what the blossoms are. These sunflowers, which Monet painted the same year they did the chrysanthemums, are so loosely painted that a botanist would find them really an inadequate illustration. And this is quite different from earlier flower pieces made in the 17th and 18th centuries when artists would include flowers from different seasons. With the hindsight that we have in the 20th century, you can look at pictures like this and see that they anticipate works which later artists made. This canvas, made in 1906 by Redon, is a classic example of the blurring of the lines between a realistic portrayal in which you can recognize things and then the symbolist idea of purely an imaginary world. And as we wander and look deeply into the canvas, you can see that it's largely a world of his own imagination. This year we wanted very much to relate architectural fragments to this big, empty, but very, very dramatic architectural space. It was a different challenge this year. The other years we used to do spring bulbs, tulips, hyacinths, rhododendrons, flowering trees, and this year we decided to do indoor plants, which are orchids. ♪ Japanese folding screens were a utilitarian device. They were used for dividing rooms, for blocking out drafts when people were sleeping, but they also became, like so many things in the East, objects of extraordinary refinement. And here at the Metropolitan there are some wonderful examples. The one behind me was made, in fact the title of it is Autumn Grasses, but as you can see there are quite a variety of different kinds of late-blooming flowers that are used as decoration. Flowers as decoration also appear in the objects that the people lived with. A good example is this picnic set. It actually was made for a Japanese family to use when they went every June to inspect the tree peonies. The tree peonies were cultivated in the Imperial Gardens, and this platter, which is in the shape of a fully open blossom, is characteristic of the marvelous form of the flowering plant, though here shown in gold and black lacquer. The colors themselves can range from red to yellow purples. The lucky members of this picnic would have carried with them this column of trays with lids, and each member would have had food prepared for them in these containers. The most amusing part of this picnic service is the sake pot. It's made out of solid silver, weighs quite a lot, and it comes equipped with its own stand made in the shape of a peony leaf. The pot is in the form of a closed peony bud, and I might say that when the flowers bloom they almost are this large. At the top of it is a spout from which the host could pour sake for his fortunate friends. Few tapestries anywhere in the world have so enchanted the eye or the imagination as those of the unicorn at the cloisters. Created, it is believed, in Belgium around 1500, they tell the story of a mythical creature whose magical horn could cure disease and purify what it touched. But to the men and women of the 16th century, the unicorn was no myth. The story of the hunt to kill this innocent for its wondrous horn is woven through seven tapestries. The end is near when it succumbs to its only weakness, the lap of a virgin maiden. Whether one sees in the unicorn a symbol of Christ or the ingenuous innocence of love, his final home has now come alive at the cloisters. This is a garden that now is in its third spring. Prior to this, the garden was a sea of English ivy with an 18-inch circular border around the fountain with bulbs and annuals and perennials plugged in. For a long time it's been the dream of the museum to have the plants of the unicorn tapestries growing near enough to the tapestries so that you could compare the flower shapes and the flower colors. In the year 1941, the New York Botanical Garden did a study of the unicorn flora and were able to find a hundred different plant shapes within the tapestries of which they were able to identify and put a Latin name to approximately 85 of those plants. One thing about tapestries and trying to interpret it as gardener, everything is in bloom at the same time. Everything is represented absolute to peak perfection, but to represent that into a garden would be the ultimate miracle. You'd have your little microclimates all over the place and you just couldn't do it. So taking that list, and then when you look closely at the second tapestry where you see the unicorn dipping its horn into the little stream in front of the fountain and you see oak trees to the back, a holly tree, you look at some of these plants for their symbolic values, the forget-me-nots, the strawberries. Whether it be unicorn tapestries or other tapestries in the collection, strawberries are going to be very prevalent throughout the work. Anything fruit or anything with multi-seed to it will be a fertility symbol. One can enjoy these just for their beauty and how to grow them into a garden, but they also are very important in terms of their religious or their symbolic presence. They're here to tell a story, and people at that time saw these flowers as storytelling devices. What the artist was doing, rather than holding a plant right in front, going out into nature and picking a flower and then holding it up next and weaving in, they were working with woodcut representations of these flowers. So if some look like the petals are quite a bit more rounded or the flowers are a little accentuated in some way, this is because it's many different times removed from the real flower. The Madonna lily, a beautiful flower that often is in medieval art in scenes of the Annunciation. It's a flower that blooms the third week in June and is extremely fragrant. The Madonna lily is just so white and so beautiful in its form, and the fragrance is very, very powerful. A dragonfly is coming down and taking from the flower. Over here, within another clump of violets and Johnny Jump Up, a brown frog. Thistle, nice thistle base and a nice thistle flower. Iris, with another dragonfly coming to the iris. This is an English daisy, Bellis perennis, a very lovely plant that comes up right in the springtime. Up here, a primrose, a beautiful spring flower. Nice set of base leaves and yellow flowers coming off the top. Down here, look very closely, you can see the flowers of the wild European columbine. This is a short-spurred flower, unlike the modern varieties which show a very long spur. This is a very beautiful short-spurred blue, and this would come into bloom the end of May and the beginning of June. Every time one comes in, whether I'm wheeling my wheelbarrow through or carrying hoses or going from gallery to gallery just walking through, I think every time one can see these tapestries a different element of it is seen and you really tend to go up close and look at the little details of it. You go, wow, you see different things all the time. You really do see some wonderful detail. It's kind of nice to see it every day. The pathway to the joys of discovery is first seeing not what is shrouded from view, but rather what is blooming before us.