Soberly titled "Vegetal", this exhibition produced by the Beaux-Arts de Paris and the Chaumet jewelry house is being held until September 4 in Paris.

It offers a dive into the world of plants - from buds to algae via ears of wheat - and their importance in the creative awakening of the greatest artists.

If painting has been fond of still lifes, the bias of this exhibition is to move away from this Epinal vision - and reductive - to substitute a plurality of looks: pieces of goldsmithery, drawings, paintings, photos, tapestries, herbariums, haute couture clothing... A total of 400 works are presented in this exhibition.

The "Végal" exhibition in Paris on June 17, 2022 BERTRAND GUAY AFP

"The idea was first to put the plant back not only at the center of the exhibition, as the element that justifies the collection of the works, but also to put the plants back in the importance they had in the training of artists", points out to AFP the botanist Marc Jeanson, curator of the exhibition.

"Forgotten Stories"

The way to achieve this?

offer the viewer works by artists little known for their interest in botany.

Like the ivy sketches signed by the architect Le Corbusier.

Or the herbarium of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau...not to mention the impressive iris paintings by Otto Dix that can be found far from his iconic broken faces.

"We don't know much about it, but Rousseau was crazy about botany", underlines Mr. Jeanson who directs the botanical collections of the Majorelle garden in Morocco.

The "Végal" exhibition in Paris on June 17, 2022 BERTRAND GUAY AFP

"The exhibition also presents a letter he wrote and which comes from his corpus + Elementary Letters on Botany +. But there you go, he argues, all these stories have been forgotten because the plants have disappeared from the corpus of 'artists'.

At a time when global warming threatens biodiversity, taking the plant world into account is a necessity, pleads the botanist.

However, "how to save species if we are not able to identify them. How to preserve what you cannot name. It is this paradox that we wanted to point out, while saying that there is no fatality “, he underlines.

Evidenced by the flowers of the pharaoh Ramses II's water lilies, dating back more than 3,000 years, which the public can admire during their visit.

The "Végal" exhibition in Paris on June 17, 2022 BERTRAND GUAY AFP

Freeing itself from any chronology, the exhibition begins with a survey of a parietal fresco carried out by André Vila in the Djerat wadi.

The palm trees that we discover there announce the central figure of the tree.

A way, if one were needed, of anchoring plants in the history of human life.

Divided into several chapters - forest, beach, dunes, agricultural plants, vegetable garden and flowers - the exhibition has been designed like a herbarium, so that the visitor has the feeling of entering a huge botanical cabinet.

The only difference: the public will be able to discover 80 jewelry objects - including impressive tiaras - most of them from the vast heritage of the jeweler Chaumet.

From the forest of the visual artist Eva Jospin, who welcomes the public, to the tulips of the painter Berthe Morisot to the bronze of the actress Sarah Bernhardt who dialogues with the algae of Anna Atkins (member of the Botanical Society of London, one of the few to accept women in 1839) the exhibition wanted to show that botany, an environment often associated with men, also influenced women artists.

Didactic, it provides mediators free of charge to the public to guide them and provide them with details.

© 2022 AFP