Sergei Chekhonin
Bouquet of Flowers
circa 1922
These are flowers with a rebellious streak in their stems. They defy and put to shame the almost ordinary grace of a tulip, carnation or rose; they dominate the power of colour and shape, with their great lolling heads seemingly overweight with ego. With even their very leaves dwarfing the wicker vase, the flowers appear to drawl in harmony of their unearthly allure not possibly found within the common garden bed. Bound to the same base, their energy of reds, blues, greens and yellows and of their sheer mammoth sizes gives the impression of their strained attempts to rip free their roots in unison, to escape from a mould jailing them to the mundane dirt of the everyday. They want to achieve feats believed incapable by mere plants capped with ludicrous, pompous hats; they want to unsettle the idea that outer prettiness means but inner plainness, or that fragility of form means only weakness of will. After all, this bouquet is indeed composed of papery blossoms, both on and off the canvas, and so it is only understandable that such a group must perform to its audience a sequence of steps unexpected of its kind - a dizzying dance of drooping heads and constant vigilance in order to, one day, finally float off from the page to full-fledged applause.
