When we think about Vincent van Gogh, most people will instantly call to mind his iconic, boldly executed and citrus-warm sunflowers. It’s a piece of brand recognition that the artist fully intended. “The sunflower is mine”, he once wrote, betraying his desire to be publicly associated with this brazen, man-sized plant and its swaggering, flame-maned crown of petals. Sunflowers clearly had a deep significance for him. So what, if anything, did Vincent intend to symbolise with his beloved helianthus annuus?
Alongside Starry Night, the National Gallery in London’s Sunflowers is perhaps his most recognisable artwork. But the artist also painted 10 other canvases that focused on these flowers. They came in three short bursts of inspiration. First was a series of four created in Paris in 1887. The second batch of four canvases were created in less than a week after his move to the southern French city of Arles in 1888. The third phase (in early 1889) involved copying three of the previous year’s compositions. The most famous versions from 1888 were painted in a flurry of confidence and sensual joy, “with the gusto of a Marseillaise eating bouillabaisse,” as he put it. And yet, when he wrote about sunflowers in his letters, Van Gogh never made clear statements about what they truly meant to him.
On one hand they appear to be a vehicle for experimenting with colour combinations – particularly the pairings of different shades of yellow. But they were also intended to fill a house where a fellow artist, Paul Gauguin, was due to live. Gauguin had admired Van Gogh’s previous sunflower paintings, so perhaps they embodied the artist’s irrepressible hopes for solidarity and friendship – desires that would ultimately be thwarted along with Vincent’s yearning for artistic recognition in his lifetime. Gauguin left Van Gogh after only two months, and Vincent would die at the age of 37 having failed to sell many of his own artworks.
But Van Gogh’s sunflower paintings rapidly accumulated cult status in the early 20th Century. It happened first among the artistic avant-garde of Europe. In 1920, the writer Katherine Mansfield noted that the “yellow flowers, brimming with sun, in a pot” had inspired her creative awakening. In 1923 the critic Roger Fry described Van Gogh’s Sunflowers as “one of the triumphant successes of this year,” which exposed the artist’s “supreme exuberance, vitality, and vehemence of attack”. They later achieved mainstream recognition, helping to make Van Gogh among the most famous and influential painters in the history of art.
“He depicts them in a great Dutch tradition: these flowers wilting and dying… the flowers that are still looking up at the sky, and then those that are slowly fading away, becoming browner, and so it’s really this meditation on the passing of time.
“I think with Kiefer, it follows similar lines,” says Domercq. “This idea of the cycle of life, of this incredibly vital flower, a southern flower, the flower that looks up at the firmament.”
