Van Gogh’s Roses and Irises@ Metropolitan Museum New York

Uma Nair

New York: History happens when the present bows to the past.At the Met Museum in New York,Van Gogh’s Roses and Irises are united in the manner of quoting T.S. Eliot’s ‘Time Past is Present.’

In May 1889, after episodes of self-mutilation and hospitalization, Vincent van Gogh chose to enter an asylum in Saint-Rémy, France. There, in the last year before his death, he created almost 130 paintings. Within the first week, he began Irises, working from nature in the asylum’s garden. The cropped composition, divided into broad areas of vivid color with monumental irises overflowing its borders, was probably influenced by the decorative patterning of Japanese woodblock prints.

Art history states that 17th-century still-life paintings are something of an acquired taste, appreciated by artists for their technical virtuosity but more likely to remind us ordinary mortals of abandoned oils discovered in an ancestor’s attic or warehouse. Certainly, in an age of electronic games and installations , displays of bouquets of flowers, may not immediately spring to mind .But this quartet at the Met in New York gives us something to savour.