Tulip Attack

MUSEUMS’ EXHIBITSFEATUREFLOWERINSPRINGSHOWS

“The tulip’s value gave it a special aura, surrounding it with mystique and the language of alchemy… The tulip…ranked as high among flowers as man among other animals and the diamond among precious stones.” —Anne Pavord, “The Tulip.”

Story by Elena JUSTASBLUEBONNETSSTART to bloom along highways of

Ivanova Texas, another kind of flower invades the Texas art scene. This spring, both the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi showcase the undying allure of the tulip. MFAH’s “Elegance and Refinement: The Still-Life Paintings of Willem van Aelst,” dazzles the eye with sumptuous displays of flowers, fruit and hunting bounty from the Dutch Golden Age. At AMST, Santa-Fe-based artist Michael Scott keeps the audience in suspense between illusion and reality with his “Buffalo Bulb’s Wild West Show,” in which iconic Buffalo Bill images are intertwined with tulips.

First, let’s address the obvious question: why tulip? What is so unusual about this modest flower that makes it so attractive to artists from 17th-century master Van Aelst to our contemporary Michael Scott?

Born in 1627, Van Aelst was ten years old when his native Holland was struck by one of the worst economic disasters in its history, the so-called tulip mania. It was caused by staggering prices for nothing less flippant and transitory than tulip bulbs. The most coveted of them could be acquired at the same price apiece as a decent-size building with a garden and a carriage house in downtown Amsterdam. Of course, this madness did not last long: the proverbial bubble finally burst sending the whole economy in a downward spiral.

The explanation of this craze lies in the tulip’s ability to develop streaks of variegating colors which, in rare instances, form a regular feather-like pattern on its petals. Only in the 20th century was it discovered that this discoloration was caused by a virus carried by peach flies. However, in 17th-century Holland this change seemed mysterious and, as many inexplicable and unpredictable things, it became the object of gambling, obsessive experimentation and market speculation.

Van Aelst belonged to the generation that came into maturity after the worst of the tulip mania was over. He probably heard horror stories of people losing their fortunes and minds in a futile pursuit of the magical flower which could make them fabulously rich. In his “Bouquet of Flowers,” a rare purplestreaked tulip rises his disheveled heads among neat and proper looking flowers, like a notorious guest who showed up uninvited at a formal party. Since baroque-era still-life paintings typically had a symbolic meaning, one may assume that the presence of a “disreputable” tulip was intended as a reminder that danger was inherent to beauty.

Three hundred and seventy-five years after the infamous tulip crisis, Michael Scott evoked the spirit of tulip mania in his work as a way of addressing

Willem van Aelst, Dutch, 1627 –after 1687,

FLOWER STILL LIFE WITH

AWATCH, 1663, Oil on canvas, Mauritshuis, The Hague Michael Scott, ABEVY OF BEAUTY. Oil on panel, 54 ½” x 43 ¾”

the question: what makes people so susceptible to trickery? In an interview given during his visit to AMST in March, the artist described the idea that lead him to the creation of “Buffalo Bulb’s Wild West Show” in the following way: “Take a flower that represents beauty, which has perfect symmetry, has no scent — then bottle and sell it to an ever-hungry, evergullible public.... But who would be the salesman? The answer, of course, was that all-American, larger-than-life icon of huckstering — Buffalo Bill Cody.”1

As we walk into the galleries featuring Scott’s paintings, drawings and prints, we immediately become the audience in the famous Wild West show, with dogs wearing tutus and cowboy outfits who are jumping through the hoops; strange-looking birds wearing Mardi Gras crowns; buffaloes, Indians, cowboys and, of course, Buffalo Bill Cody himself. All of them, however, are provided with tulips either as costume accessories or props. In some cases, Buffalo Bill is incorporated into famous 17th-century paintings dating back to the heyday of tulip mania. In “The Tulip Traders,” he is portrayed sitting side-by-side with Dutch merchants and giving his opinion on tulip bulbs. In “The Ship of Fools,” he is leading the way for Flora’s carriage, which is filled with a tulip-crazy crowd.

Besides their passion for tulips, Van Aelst and Scott have something else in common: a penchant for painting in the style of trompe-l’oeil, the purpose of which is to make painted objects look as palpable as if they were real.

The interest in creating illusionist paintings probably is as old as art itself. Although the term “trompe-l’oeil” was not coined until the 18th century, when art history as scholarship developed, the ability to paint life-like images was already admired in antiquity. In the famous Greek story about the competition between artists Zeuxis and Parrhasius, Zeuxis so skillfully painted