The flowers of evil in the Scharf-Gerstenberg collection: terrible and beautiful at the same time

The young woman balances an obscure bouquet between her fingers. They could be meadow flowers, whose contours dissolve in the smoky atmosphere of the charcoal and chalk drawing (around 1890) by Odilon Redon. The beauty, turned into quarter profile, breathes in the scent deeply and tilts her head back lasciviously. Is she herself the “Fleur du Mal”, the evil flower of the picture title? In the case of a Redon adaptation by the Austrian Arnulf Rainer (“Without Title”, 1984), the artist himself comes under suspicion: Rainer took the section of the female head – and badly messed up the reproduction with ink and oil pastel.

“Evil Flowers”: The exhibition title is like this catchy how absurd. Who wanted to judge plants morally? What other species was driven out of paradise? “The title was almost too good,” admits Kyllikki Zacharias, head of the Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection, who thought about an exhibition around Charles Baudelaire’s volume of poetry “Les Fleurs du Mal” six years ago – and received enthusiastic reactions at the project stage. “But the selection of works has to keep up with the title!” says Zacharias today.

It was worth it. Not least because of Otto Piene’s “Fleurs du Mal” (1969), the 13 black blow-up plastic flowers that rise up and collapse again in a flash of strobe lights. The cotton field installation “The Harvest of Time” (2023) by the Kurdish artist Fatoş Irwen, who wrapped the hair of her fellow prisoners in a Turkish prison around the plant heads, is also impressive.

The show with around 120 works of art, artifacts and documents from the 19th century to the present invites you to take a stroll through the eerie garden of modernity. Starting with the Parisian Baudelaire (1821-1867), who, like no other poet before him, sowed doubts about all the ideals and took a look at human abysses.

Baudelaire was very fond of art, but also selective; the first edition of “Fleurs du Mal” was not illustrated. However, his language images were shocking in 1857 and the collection was banned because of “insulting public morals”. Baudelaire rejected an illustration as a frontispiece for the revised and expanded edition of 1861 as “ridiculous”. Only Félicien Rops created a graphic for the Belgian “Flotsam” volume with the six poems banned in France that the author liked: Next to Rops ‘ Etching of a tree of knowledge mutated into a skeleton, surrounded by plants that symbolize the seven deadly sins, other graphics are on display.

Above all, the symbolist Odilon Redon, who no longer knew the poet, who died early from syphilis, was passionate about “The Flowers of Evil” and promoted Baudelaire’s fame. Both were important sources of inspiration for surrealism, which is the focus of the Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection. Of course, René Magritte’s “Les Fleurs du Mal” screenprint from 1946 should not be missed, a statuesque female nude with a rose.

Demonized sexuality: In 1931, Fernand Léger drew “tree trunks” like group sex participants. A random vulva appears in the middle of a flattened cactus (2023) from the workshop of Julius von Bismarck, while Paul Klee deliberately formed the mouth of the wicked Pandora (watercolor from 1920) from vertically arranged labia.

In addition to “Eros and Intoxication,” one exhibition chapter is called “Depression,” because Baudelaire was desperately unhappy about his already very capitalized and soberly designed world. This is what connects the ‘Second Empire‘ with the present. On display are the “Gardens of Horror” photographed by biologist Ulf Soltau – manifestations of a trend that has been spreading for several years to transform front gardens into stone deserts. Baudelaire would also have hated decorative nature, while he was fascinated by disease and decay. We too can hardly look away from Gundula Schulze Eldowy’s “Mummies” (2016) – the centuries-old dead, revitalized through the photographic medium, appear so alive.

The mushroom clouds over Japan in 1945, the photo-frosted explosion clouds of 9/11 or the colorful coronavirus illustrations in the exhibition can also be described as flowers of evil – terrible and beautiful at the same time. Is the aestheticization of horror, as Baudelaire first carried out on a large scale, immoral? No, what is perverse is simply the cult of beauty without any sense of the unfathomable. Like Leni Riefenstahl, from whom two film excerpts are juxtaposed in the show: Nazi formations from “Triumph of the Will” and shimmering schools of fish from her late “Impressions under Water”. Riefenstahl wanted to find both equally beautiful. It is people who produce the worst things.