Soul of the Sunflower, Elihu Vedder; Chelsea Tile Works

Exhibition Label: "This Land," Mar-2014, Kate Meyer This device once lined fireplaces to radiate heat. Vedder’s composition merges a human form with the essence of a flower to produce a luminous embodiment of a sunflower. He envisioned the metamorphic power a hearth’s blaze would afford such sculpted spirits, declaring that, “lighted by the flames or the flickering light of the dying fire or the glow of the embers they would seem alive.” Archive Label: Many of Elihu Vedder's paintings, sculptures, and graphic works seem early manifestations of art nouveau ideologies. The decorative qualities of his art, his subjects of women in floral or animal guises, and his frequent use of flowing lines are related both to the Symbolist painters in Euope and to art nouveau designers of the next decade. Archive Label: Floral and feminine imagery, both separately and in combination, were the most frequently used motifs of the movement known as art nouveau. Women with flowers, women in flowers, and women as flowers were recurrent images in the years surrounding 1900, and although regional and artistic variations on these themes existed, in both Europe and the United States there was an emphasis on the organic and the feminine. Today art nouveau is largely regarded as a style, one consisting of whiplash curves and over-the-top ornament. It was in its own time regarded as a movement towards modernism and as a means of revitalizing the arts- especially the decorative arts. To achieve such revitalization, art dealers, critics, and artists endorsed a return to nature. Plants and flowers were obvious natural themes, but images of women were also used. Like nature, the art nouveau woman could be a vital organic force. At the turn of the century, many artists, writers, and poets found an equivalence between women and nature. Although more often shown juxtaposed with nature, as when women are depicted contemplating flowers or enjoying the outdoors, women in art nouveau imagery could also allegorize or become nature. They could become animals, such as mermaids or peacocks, or insects, such as dragonflies and spiders. Women could assume the role of a celestial constellation, personify a rainbow as the Greek goddess Iris, or, less optimistically, become a destructive force such as a whirlwind. Most frequently, however, women’s natural counterparts were flowers, and the two become one in Vedder’s Soul of the Sunflower.