Floral Arrangement by Jessica Douglass

This weekend only at the Saint Louis Art Museum the show Art in Bloom is being exhibited. Billed as a celebration of art and flowers, this pairing of flower arrangements with specific artworks is now an annual event at the museum. I believe that this show was inaugurated last year. It is much more of a sensation this year. Scattered around the museum, are almost forty such pairings of art and flowers. When I attended this show the creator of each arrangement was there to interpret their work. This tended to cause a throng to gather around many of the arrangements that clogged ones progress through the show and I can’t say that I garnered any additional insights from hearing any of these interpretations either. Last year, I viewed the show in the off hours and is was a nicer experience.  

Like the show’s judges (Winner of the Judges Choice award), I’ve picked the arrangement by Jessica Douglass as a good example of how these pairings are supposed to work. The photo captures both the flowers and the art that inspired their arrangement. In this case it is the painting by Günther Förg, entitled Rivoli I (1989), which is located in the museum’s contemporary wing. The painting is composed of two vertical rectangles, one is tangerine orange and the other dark violet. They are bisected by a mustard yellow line. As with most of the floral arrangements, Douglass has accurately captured the colors in this painting and because of its minimalist geometry has also been able to mimic its structure. Elsewhere in the museum, attempts to model the form of less contemporary art did not succeed as well.