LATE BLOOMS

'I often evoke the floral souls you bring forth from ancient vases.' Rilke to Rodin.

Flowers were significant for Bomberg and Manet's late paintings, certainly in the Jerwood flower painting by Bomberg there is this sense of the 'spirit in the mass' though very much a brooding one. Manet used flowers to exemplify that abstract mark he developed alongside Morisot. I think these late flower paintings are insufficiently appreciated by Richardson, who saw them as a trivial last phase. Seen against 'LeDéjeuner sur l'herbe' less heroic, but a different preoccupation, more about that inner language as in Nolde. Again late style, something further to say and no less confident and determined for that.