Connections/Greenhouse

My name is Rebecca Rabinow, I'm a curator of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European paintings here at the Metropolitan Museum.

I think flowers and foliage are timeless and have interested people from every generation and every culture.

In college, I spent a lot of time in the greenhouse, sometimes I would even do my work there.

And here at The Met I see qualities of this building that

remind me of the greenhouse that I love so much back in school.

In the nineteenth-century galleries there's one room that I think of as our greenhouse. It's full of fantastic pictures

by Bonnard and Vuillard who are two of the great colorists of the first half of the twentieth-century. And there's a picture by Bonnard that shows the view from the back of his country house. And the colors just emanate from it in a fog, the blues and the purples and the melon colors.

And it takes awhile before I even can register the composition or see the boaters on the river out in the distance.

A painting by Vuillard, I think most people who look at it first see there's a standing figure on the right in a rose-colored dressing gown.

But almost everyone misses the kneeling figure on the left, and that was one of Vuillard's great loves, Lucy Hessle, and this is a picture of her country house.

There are some paintings that just capture my attention when I walk by. Right now I have a crush on a sixteenth-century Italian painting that has a gigantic laurel tree. It's a huge picture and this laurel tree dominates the entire gallery.

And I don't even look at any of the religious imagery at all. There's something about the tree. It just resets my equilibrium for the day, I feel like I've been outside.

Flora isn't always something that's beautiful and nice and friendly. There's no better instance than my own pet, which is a Venus flytrap.

And seeing that thing close in on a spider, it's just really distressing. And I think in a painting like Rousseau's picture The Repast of the Lion, he really captures that violence that nature can present and this jungle vegetation is so menacing.

Or the sexuality that so many people see in flowers. Georgia O'Keeffe painted her Black Iris in 1926 and since it was exhibited, critics have likened it to female genitalia. She always denied that that was her intent, but the fact that people see it that way is a valid thing.

This is a design that has inspired people for many, many reasons throughout time.

And of course you can't talk about foliage without talking about The Cloisters. I always try to arrange a family field trip every spring so I can go out in the gardens which are just breathtaking, as is the view across the Hudson River. And when the pollen gets too much for my family, we retreat inside

and I just lose myself in The Unicorn Tapestries.

Every year I think I find the exact same number of flowers that I can identify, but just when I turn around to inform my family of what I've found, they've always wandered off in search of some gory reliquary. And that's the thing about the Met, it's a great museum because there's something here for everyone.