The cryptic symbolism of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers – and what they actually imply

They helped to make Vincent van Gogh among the many most well-known and influential painters within the historical past of artwork. Why did sunflowers obsess him and so many different artists earlier than and since?

Once we take into consideration Vincent van Gogh, most individuals will immediately recall to mind his iconic, boldly executed and citrus-warm sunflowers. It is a piece of name recognition that the artist totally supposed. “The sunflower is mine”, he as soon as wrote, betraying his want to be publicly related to this brazen, man-sized plant and its swaggering, flame-maned crown of petals. Sunflowers clearly had a deep significance for him. So what, if something, did Vincent intend to symbolise along with his beloved helianthus annuus? 

Alongside Starry Evening, the Nationwide Gallery in London’s Sunflowers is maybe his most recognisable paintings. However the artist additionally painted 10 different canvases that centered on these flowers. They got here in three quick bursts of inspiration. First was a sequence of 4 created in Paris in 1887. The second batch of 4 canvases have been created in lower than every week after his transfer to the southern French metropolis of Arles in 1888. The third part (in early 1889) concerned copying three of the earlier 12 months’s compositions. Probably the most well-known variations from 1888 have been painted in a flurry of confidence and sensual pleasure, “with the gusto of a Marseillaise consuming bouillabaisse,” as he put it. And but, when he wrote about sunflowers in his letters, Van Gogh by no means made clear statements about what they really meant to him.

On one hand they look like a automobile for experimenting with color mixtures – significantly the pairings of various shades of yellow. However they have been additionally supposed to fill a home the place a fellow artist, Paul Gauguin, was attributable to dwell. Gauguin had admired Van Gogh’s earlier sunflower work, so maybe they embodied the artist’s irrepressible hopes for solidarity and friendship – needs that might finally be thwarted together with Vincent’s craving for creative recognition in his lifetime. Gauguin left Van Gogh after solely two months, and Vincent would die on the age of 37 having didn’t promote a lot of his personal artworks.

However Van Gogh’s sunflower work quickly amassed cult standing within the early twentieth Century. It occurred first among the many creative avant-garde of Europe. In 1920, the author Katherine Mansfield famous that the “yellow flowers, brimming with solar, in a pot” had impressed her inventive awakening. In 1923 the critic Roger Fry described Van Gogh’s Sunflowers as “one of many triumphant successes of this 12 months,” which uncovered the artist’s “supreme exuberance, vitality, and vehemence of assault”. They later achieved mainstream recognition, serving to to make Van Gogh among the many most well-known and influential painters within the historical past of artwork.

Van Gogh’s affect into the twenty first Century is the topic of the Royal Academy’s newest exhibition, Kiefer / Van Gogh, which explores his impression on one in every of our biggest modern artists, Anselm Kiefer. And sunflowers play a key position. On the coronary heart of the present is Danaë, a brand new sculpture by Kiefer that depicts a sunflower rising from a pile of books. Elsewhere is a woodcut which depicts a helianthus annuus sprouting from the physique of a susceptible human physique. They draw consideration to Kiefer’s enduring curiosity within the motif, they usually give us the chance to unlock the mysterious symbolism of the plant in each his and Van Gogh’s artwork.

“For Van Gogh the sunflower embodies his thought of the South,” the exhibition’s curator Julien Domercq tells the BBC, referring to his transfer from Paris to Provence. However Van Gogh had labored as an artwork vendor as a youthful man, and was very well-educated in artwork historical past. His cultural information comes by way of in the way in which he represented the flowers. “He depicts them in an amazing Dutch custom: these flowers wilting and dying… the flowers which are nonetheless trying up on the sky, after which these which are slowly fading away, changing into browner, and so it is actually this meditation on the passing of time.

“I believe with Kiefer, it follows related traces,” says Domercq. “This concept of the cycle of life, of this extremely very important flower, a southern flower, the flower that appears up on the firmament.”

All creative symbolism may be defined by the evolution of concepts and associations. The which means of sunflowers has its roots prior to now and has germinated widespread discussions, each in science and the humanities. Van Gogh was not the primary or solely inventive thoughts in historical past to be obsessed by them. They’ve set aflame the creativeness of numerous artists and writers prior to now, together with amongst others Sir Anthony van Dyck, Maria van Oosterwyck, William Blake, Oscar Wilde, Dorothea Tanning, Paul Nash and Allen Ginsberg. 

In contrast to many different symbols in artwork historical past, the sunflower is comparatively new. They’re native to the Americas and have been solely launched to the “Outdated World” following Columbus’s explorations and European colonisation within the sixteenth Century. Once they have been efficiently cultivated and propagated in Europe, the truth that immature sunflowers transfer their faces to comply with the solar (a phenomenon generally known as heliotropism) grew to become the vegetation’ most compelling function, which basically formed its symbolic meanings.

In 1568, the botanist Giacomo Antonio Cortuso, linked the flower to an historic mythological character named Clytie. Clytie was mentioned to have fallen in love with Apollo, a god related to the solar, and fixated on his motion by way of the sky till ultimately her ft rooted into the bottom, and she or he reworked right into a heliotropic flower. 

The sunflower was quickly related immediately with Clytie in artwork, turning it into an icon of devoted love. You may see this in work like Maria van Oosterwyck’s Flowers in an Decorative Vase (1670-75) the place a carnation and sunflower gaze adoringly at one another above a sculpture that appears like a washing Venus however is strongly paying homage to the motionless Clytie. In Bartholomeus Van der Helst’s Younger Girl Holding a Sunflower (1670), the bloom nearly definitely signifies the girl’s marriage, displaying the way it had developed into an emblem of romantic love and attachment.

However the theme of devotion was additionally linked to faith in artworks. In Anthony van Dyck’s Relaxation on the Flight into Egypt (1632), the Virgin Mary has a sunflower above her to symbolise her position as an intercessor between the earthly and the heavenly. The flower now connoted non secular faithfulness as nicely. 

In 1654 the Dutch poet and playwright Joost van den Vondel instructed that the sunflower may very well be an emblem of artwork itself. Simply as a younger sunflower follows the course of the solar, he wrote, “thus the artwork of portray, from innate inclination and kindled by a sacred hearth, follows the fantastic thing about nature.” This may increasingly maintain the important thing to a different of Anthony van Dyck’s work, Self-Portrait with a Sunflower (1633), during which the artist factors meaningfully at himself and a sunflower, as if to check himself to this naturally attentive heliotropic plant.

However artwork historians have argued that it actually alludes to the faithfulness of the artist to his patron, King Charles I of England, to whom Van Dyck was employed as “Principal Painter”. This political symbolism of sunflowers reverberates even in modern artworks. In Ai Weiwei’s 2010 Sunflower Seeds, for instance, the 100 million hand-painted porcelain seeds have been impressed by the artist’s recollection of posters of Chairman Mao. These depicted him as a solar above fields of devoted sunflowers, to indicate his almighty energy over the Chinese language folks.

The constant which means throughout the various symbolism of sunflowers is faithfulness. It’s attainable that Van Gogh was conscious of a few of these ideas. When he wrote to his sister that his work have been “nearly a cry of anguish whereas symbolising gratitude within the rustic sunflower” he might have been interested by his personal easy and sunflower-like appreciation to fellow artists like Gauguin. However he may have been interested by his beforehand religious non secular beliefs, romantic love, and even his obligation to the artwork of portray.

How Van Gogh influenced Anselm Kiefer, and whether or not the 2 align of their considering on sunflowers is one other fascinating subject. Kiefer has beforehand acknowledged that “the sunflower is related with the celebs, as a result of it strikes its head in opposition to the solar. And within the evening, it is closed. The second they explode they’re yellow and implausible: that is already the declining level. So, sunflowers are the image of our situation d’etre [condition of being].” 

In his woodcut print Hortus Conclusus (2007-14), Kiefer’s sunflowers evokes decay extra emphatically than Van Gogh, but additionally the prospect of regeneration. They’re blackened and desiccated. However they typically additionally present their seeds cascading to the bottom, and thus the promise of recent life to come back.

Kiefer has cited as his inspiration one other determine of the seventeenth Century – the doctor, occult thinker and cosmologist Robert Fludd. One in all Fludd’s beliefs was within the correspondence between the dwelling vegetation of the Earth and the celebs, and a mystical hyperlink between the bottom types of life and a singular heavenly reality. In his photos of sunflowers, Kiefer sometimes has them framed by the sky to remind us of sunflowers’ heliotropic attachment to the solar. When proven rising from human our bodies, it’s as if to symbolise Fludd’s perception within the connection of our souls to heaven.

It reinforces the concept that the symbolism of sunflowers continues to be indebted to the beliefs of the late Renaissance. Van Gogh’s sunflowers additionally replicate facets of those historic associations and allude to his eager for a deeper love – both for nature, artwork, faith, or his want for a inventive brotherhood with Gauguin.

However in his and Kiefer’s fingers, helianthus annuus additionally convey common considerations – our want to replicate upon the transience of life, and to seek for increased and extra everlasting rules. Sunflowers symbolise a loyalty to ideas that exist past our understanding, main us to assume past our day-to-day actuality, and stretch in direction of to the heat, mild and love of the heavens. It is one thing to consider as summer season heats up, and actual sunflowers as soon as once more blaze, all too briefly, within the ecstasy of life.