Jean-Michel Othoniel

French artist Jean-Michel Othoniel's art-historical ABC of flowers, from Acanthus to Zea Mays. During his 2012 residency at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, French artist Jean-Michel Othoniel (born 1964) delved into the archives of the magnificent garden that Isabella Stewart Gardner, the first American woman to graduate with a degree in horticulture, cultivated around her residence. Othoniel examined the museum (where nothing has been moved since its owners died) and photographed the flowers in the tapestries, ironwork, architecture, furnishings and paintings, in such masterpieces as van Dyck's 'Portrait of a Woman' with its innocuous rose, Piermatteo d'Amelia's 'Annunciation' with its majestic lily and Bartolomé Bermejo's 'Saint Engracia' with its enigmatic palm. This giftworthy volume presents his art-historical ABC of these flowers, from Acanthus to Zea Mays.

L'herbier merveilleux

A follow-up to The Secret Language of Flowers: Notes on the Hidden Meanings of Flowers in Art . To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Louvre pyramid, Jean-Michel Othoniel was invited to create a work relating the importance of flowers in the Museum's eight art departments. The artist photographed the floral wealth concealed in the masterpieces of the Museum's painting, drawing, sculpture, embroidery and enamel collections. Using this, Othoniel composes his own original herbarium, accompanied with notes on the secret language of flowers and their symbolism in the history of art. Among the seventy details of flowers, you will find the thistle in Dürer's selfportrait, the poppy in the Paros funerary stele, the apple sitting on a stool in The Lock by Fragonard, or the peony attached to the unfastened blouse of the young woman in Greuze's Broken Pitcher. The work also introduces us to lesser-known details in works, offering a magnificent treasure hunt for visitors of the museum. Amid this vast prairie spangled with symbolic flowers, the artist asks this question: If there could be only one, which would be the Louvre's flower? A question to which the artist himself offers his own response.

Herbier merveilleux du Louvre

Christine Angot

Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin (Paris, France)

Pour la première fois, l'artiste Jean-Michel Othoniel, connu pour ses installations en verre de Murano dont "Le Kiosque des Noctambules" (place du Palais-Royal, Paris), publie dix ans d'œuvres sur papier.

Jean-Michel Othoniel

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