COLOGNE.- What do plants mean to human beings? The exhibition Green Modernism: The New View of Plants takes us back to the early twentieth century and examines the depiction of plants in the visual arts and how they were viewed in botany and society in general. After all, as plain as potted plants in pictures may appear at first glance, and as matter-of-fact as botanical reports read, they always also attest to the contradictions, fears, longings, and ideologies of the modern age.
The exhibition focuses on this topic with around 130 exhibits in four chapters.
I. The Plant as the Other
The Comedian Harmonists sang about a plant that was extraordinarily popular at the beginning of the twentieth century. Cactuses were “hunted” in the Americas in order to be grown and sold on the German market. Like a big game hunter, the plant collector Curt Backeberg had a portrait of himself taken in white clothing with a lasso in his arm next to a meter-high cactus. In this respect, indoor gardens, which were cultivated, sung about, photographed, and painted, were colonial gardens, and thus the private continuation of the palm houses that had become popular in the nineteenth century. Those who wanted to be modern filled their homes with cactuses, rubber trees, and other plants that grew outdoors only in warmer climates, but could flourish indoors thanks to coal heating and large windows. Aenne Biermann photographed her own collection of cactuses, Albert Renger-Patzsch made recommendations about photographing cactuses for amateur photographers, and the art historian and collector Rosa Schapire had Karl Schmidt-Rottluff design a “cactus home” for her. Meanwhile, tubular-steel furniture was shown next to cactuses in interior design magazines as a matter of course.
II. The Appropriated Plant
After 1918, the New Woman, wearing floral dresses, continued to pay homage to Flora, the goddess of flowers. In a time of increasing “gender disorder,” when short hair no longer marked a woman’s sexual identity and Magnus Hirschfeld conducted gender reassignment surgeries, flowers remained prominent in fashion: August Sander’s smoking garçonne Anneli Strohal wore flowers on her dress, as did Lili Elbe even before her operations. And Marlene Dietrich wore a giant flower in the buttonhole of her dark suit in a nod to the often discussed fear of the “masculinization” of modern women. The adoption of flowers as a passive lure in the service of procreation can be found in perhaps its most ritual form in wedding pictures, in the hair and hands of the brides. Floral elements were also present underneath people’s clothing, namely as tattoos, as Christian Warlich’s tattoo art from the 1920s shows.
III. The Plant as Form and Color
The photographer Karl Blossfeldt was not interested in the names and functions of plants. What intrigued him was their form, which he revealed by pruning the plants he photographed—often to the point of nonrecognition so they could be used by artisans as reference material for their designs. Plants even served as “building material” for professional florists. Others, such as the artist Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, used flowers, including the poisonous larkspur, to add an accent of color to a painting.
IV. The Plant as Relative
The philosopher Walter Benjamin was not the only one who was fascinated by photographs of plants under the microscope and time-lapse recordings. Cinemas were packed with audiences for the film Das Blumenwunder, which presented plants in a completely new way. These miraculous images came from the time-lapse laboratory recordings of experiments with the first artificial fertilizer, which was developed to help feed the world’s growing population. The fact that plants are alive, move, have a pulse, and can grow tired was described by the physicist Jagadish Chandra Bose in his popular book Plant Autographs and Their Revelations. At the same time, the biosophist Ernst Fuhrmann dramatically lit and staged plants for his photography book Die Pflanze als Lebewesen. The boundaries between lifeforms had become more fluid, and so it is not surprising that horror fantasies about plants can also be found in film and literature of the Weimar Republic, such as carnivorous plants, which were only recognized in botany with Charles Darwin.
Artists: Hans Arp, Max Baur, Arthur Benda, Aenne Biermann, Karl Blossfeldt, Otto Dix, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Hugo Erfurth, Max Ernst, Otto Feldmann, Ernst Fuhrmann, Albert and Richard Theodor Gottheil, Erich Heckel, Heinrich Hoerle, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Werner Mantz, Franz Pichler Jr., Anton Räderscheidt, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Ludwig Ernst Ronig, August Sander, Karl Schenker, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Richard Seewald, Friedrich Seidenstücker, Franz Wilhelm Seiwert, Renée Sintenis, Carl Strüwe
Also featuring: Marta Astfalck-Vietz, Jagadish Chandra Bose, Comedian Harmonists, Lili Elbe, Wilhelm Murnau, Max Reichmann, Christian Warlich, and others
Eco-curating: Sustainable Exhibitions
Green Modernism: The New View of Plants is a pilot project in eco-curating for the Museum Ludwig. Germany has committed to being carbon-neutral by 2045, and Cologne is planning to be carbon-neutral by 2035. Cultural institutions also want and need to establish new environmental standards for their operations—especially museums, which are among the major CO2 emitters in the cultural sector with air conditioning, lighting, travel, and shipping. Green Modernism: The New View of Plants will explore the possibilities for presenting sustainable exhibitions and make them transparent. This marks the continuation of the transformation initiated by the museum’s sustainability team, whose goals can be found in the sustainability report of the Deutscher Nachhaltigkeits Kodex (DNK).
We are able to conserve resources and emit less CO2 by working with our own collection, since this requires less shipping and packing of artworks. On the museum’s rooftop terrace, old shipping crates are now being recycled as raised beds. These are used to grow herbs, which will be served in the museum restaurant as part of the exhibition, thanks to a partnership. And yet, we won’t do without pictures from outside of our own collection—just original works. To conserve wood and water, the catalogue will be published online at green-modernism.de in a climate-neutral manner and will be accessible to everyone free of charge. All other print products will be printed locally on Blue Angel-certified paper with mineral oil-free ink. Exhibition architecture from previous exhibitions will be reused or recycled by our in-house carpenters. Since 2021, the museum has been getting 100 percent of its electricity from hydropower. And one euro of every admission ticket will go to the nature conservation project MoorFutures in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany --Claudia Roth, Commissioner to the Federal Government for Culture and Media, is acting as patron of the exhibition.
The exhibition is sponsored by the Freunde des Wallraf-Richartz-Museum und des Museum Ludwig e.V., the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, the Peter and Irene Ludwig Foundation, the Karin and Uwe Hollweg Foundation, the Landschaftsver¬band Rhein-land (LVR), and Sparkasse KölnBonn.
Curator: Miriam Szwast, advised by Suzanne Pierre, ecologist and biogeochemist with a focus on global nutrient cycles in soils and forests. Her research interests include the carbon cycle in plant and microbial systems under the influence of climate change. She is also the founder of and principal researcher at the Critical Ecology Lab, a non-profit organization focused on the intersection of global environmental change, social justice, and the liberation of oppressed peoples.
