Evil Flowers

Odilon Redon, Cul-de-lampe, Illustration for Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire, 1891 © Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg / Dietmar Katz

Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) by Charles Baudelaire is one of the milestones of world literature. First published in Paris in 1857, the volume caused a scandal that led to Baudelaire being taken to court. Despite these less than auspicious beginnings, the poems were to have an enormous impact. In literature as well as in art, they laid the foundations for a new aesthetic that overturned the traditional idea of the oneness of the beautiful and the good.

Taking Odilon Redon’s charcoal drawing Fleur du Mal (c. 1890) in the Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection as its starting point, this exhibition takes the visitor on a journey through the art of the early modernist period all the way to contemporary works that shed light on the various aspects of Baudelaire’s aesthetics as well as its after- and side effects. In addition to a small selection of works that were created as a direct response to his poems, the exhibition focuses on specific themes that are central to Les Fleurs du Mal.

These include depression, which Baudelaire referred to as ‘spleen’, a subject to which he devoted a large part of his poetry, the consolations of eroticism and intoxication, but also the lure of saccharine surrogates or kitsch, and the aestheticization of disease and decay. The idea of the excessive, the rampant and the luxuriantly efflorescent plays an important role here. For it is often exaggeration that tips the balance between good and evil.