An exploration of flowers in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art.
 
Flowers have been a popular motif in art for centuries. As the epitome of natural beauty and earthly mortality since the Baroque era, flowers remain an object of fascination for artists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, serving as a symbol for love and life as well as for decay and destruction. This volume features more than one hundred and twenty works in a variety of media, including painting, photography, video, and installation. The book shows the changes in meaning and the topicality of flowers from the study of color and form via sociopolitical and gender-specific questions to reflections on existence, the environment, and new technologies. This lavishly illustrated book also offers an art-historical review and essays on the political dimensions and everyday culture of our dealings with flowers.