An exhibition about plants at Cologne’s Ludwig Museum

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In Green Modernism. The New View of Plants a major German museum, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, looks at the deeper significance of plants for human beings, because plants offer a glimpse of the contradictions, fears, yearnings and ideologies of modern times. The exhibition, curated by Miriam Szwast with the assistance of Suzanne Pierre, an ecologist and biogeochemist specialising in the global nutrient cycle in the soil and forests, includes about objects exhibited in four sections explaining our relationship with the botanical world. Beginning with The Plant as the Other, and the Comedian Harmonists’ early twentieth-century song about the little green cactus.

The cactus was an extremely popular plant at the turn of the century, when it was „hunted“ in the Americas in order to be grown and sold on the German market. To be modern you needed to fill your house Phone Number List with cactuses, rubber trees and other species that only grow outdoors in tropical climates, but could now flourish in private homes thanks to coal heating and large windows: a fashion that naturally made its mark on art and design, as the exhibition demonstrates. The second theme is The Appropriated Plant and its psychological repercussions: from the days of Flora, the goddess of flowers, to this time of great ferment in society and identity, the flower has preserved its symbolic power, not only in bridal bouquets and on clothes but on the skin, as demonstrated by Christian Warlich’s tattoo art of the twenties.



The Plant as Form and Colour begins with the work of photographer Karl Blossfeldt, who was interested solely in the form of plants, pruning them for his photographs, which became reference material for artisans’ designs. There are plenty of references to professional floriculture and unusual uses of flowers, such as artist Karl Schmidt-Rottluff’s use of flowers like the poisonous larkspur to create contrasting colours in his paintings. The Plant as Relative presents the popularisation of the world of botany through media such as film, with the time-lapses of flowers blooming that were so popular in the cinemas of the s. But this is more than just a voyage of exploration of the infinite ways in which plants enrich our lives and inspire artists in a variety of disciplines: it is a concrete effort to present a truly sustainable exhibition.