Sunflowers, 1963

Leopold Hauer (1896–1984) quotes in his Sunflowers of 1963 those famously painted by Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890). But unlike with van Gogh whose flowers are shiningly bright in a vase, the colors in Hauer’s picture are pale and cool. The six sunflowers are the only content of the picture, their leaves drooping, wilted. They stand alone in a barren waste of patchy whiteness. Behind them, Hauer draws a thick brown line that could be a horizon. Sky and ground are hardly distinguished from one another, though. It is little wonder that not only the surroundings are desolate but the flowers growing there on their long, almost parallel stems are dying. The artist thus makes transitoriness the subject of his sober work, reinterpreting the sunflowers that often convey cheerfulness and confidence to mean something different.

RR, 2021