Stéphane Mallarmé, 1892
(Oil on canvas, 50 x 40.2 cm)
BY Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Musée National du Château
de Versailles et du Trianon
PHOTO: WikiPaintings

The edge between abstraction and exactitude (representation) is a flickering edge where the symbol makes its home. “When I say: ‘a flower!’” Stéphane Mallarmé writes, “then from that forgetfulness to which my voice consigns all floral form, something different from the usual calyces arises, something all music, essence, and softness: the flower which is absent from all bouquets.”^[11] It is almost impossible to really see a flower, Mallarmé thought, clouded as it is by cliché, the “usual calyces.” Writing in his 1803 essay, “Crisis in Poetry,” he was speaking for a new and modern kind of symbol, one that did not attach the object as a referent to an already established religious or cultural system — the rose as symbol of the Passion of Christ, for instance. To release flower from its representations might have been the same challenge to him as to these painters: “Why should we perform the miracle by which a natural object is almost made to disappear beneath the magic waving wand of the written word, if not to divorce that object from the direct and the palpable, and so conjure up its essence in all purity?”^[11] The symbol, as we know, presumes an other that is deeply connected to it, a presence or essence underneath, or beneath what we know of it. For Mallarmé, the task was not to name it but to allow or conjure that essence.

Many of Graves’ later flower paintings had their precursors in his earlier images meant to convey metaphysical realities, works such as Vessel Seeking to Achieve Its Ideal Image Form, Chalice, and Joyous Young Pine. These paintings “share the same, simple compositional device of two central formal elements — one, usually circular, above, and the other, usually vertical, directly underneath,” Wolff points out. This “one-over-one compositional formula,”^[12] a circle over a line, an upside down exclamation mark, the astrological symbol for Venus and for woman, resembles, of course, a human head over a body, as well as a bloom over a stalk. Wolff suggests that it was, for Graves, a “visual metaphor for man’s progressive spiritual evolution — from fragmentation and imperfection (the lower, earthbound forms) to wholeness and perfection (the moon/blossom).”^[12] Shapiro says of Mondrian’s individual stalks of chrysanthemum, sunflower, and amaryllis that “The thematic reduction to singleness [one flower] seems to speak often as a rhetorical devise: the flower for the body.”^[13] A phenomenology of the flower image might speak to this conundrum: the flower as the most real and the most abstract. The flower as body and the flower as soul.

If one is an herbalist, or an amateur botanist, finding and identifying plants is often dependent on first encountering them during their time of flowering. As sprout or stem or grass blade or leaf, the plant fades into the general background green in the same way that we become en masse on the streets of our cities. To flower is to distinguish oneself by color, shape, and fragrance, to become as individualized as the face of the beloved. Most of us can name our mother’s or grandmother’s favorite flower. My mother’s is lilac; my grandmother’s was gladiola. The idea that each kind of flower has a specific personality or quality or message to convey is the basis for a system of correspondences originating in Persia called The Language of Flowers, which reached the height of its popularity in Europe in the early 1900s, but which we still vaguely apperceive when we choose roses for our lovers or daisies or carnations for our friends. What is the mystery contained in the image of a flower that we recognize in it something human, something flesh and blood and body? We find it in Stein’s famous whispering of eros in “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” or in Blake’s symbol of spoiled love, “The Sick Rose.” (O Rose, thou art sick! / The invisible worm / That flies in the night, / In the howling storm, / Has found out thy bed / Of crimson joy, / And his dark secret love / Does thy life destroy.)^[15] But allegory is not what makes the flower paintings of Graves or Mondrian or Manet distinctive. To allegorize is not to “restore to flowers their specific identity,” as Yau wrote about Graves’ paintings, but to blur those distinctions in favor of a meaning everyone can agree on. Allegory, writes Henry Corbin, in his book on the creative imagination Alone with the Alone, is but a degraded form of the Image, one in which we no longer see the individual flower in front of us. “Allegory is a rational operation, implying no transition to a new plane of being or to a new depth of consciousness.”^[16] The allegorical image stays where it was first nailed down, in Persia or in England in the eighteenth century. It quits speaking to us. The symbolic image, on the other hand, “announces a plane of consciousness distinct from rational evidence; it is the ‘cipher’ of a mystery.”^[16] What is the mystery contained in the image of a flower that we recognize in it something human, something flesh and blood and body?