Plants and flowers have been employed as interior decoration from time immemorial.  From Egyptian lotus-flowered temples to Roman ivy-wreathed hallways, from the grand bouquets of French foyers to our philodendron entwined cubicles, plants have been with us every step of the way. 

Flowers, vines, leafy branches - they all capture the basic elements of design: line, form, color, and texture. Who can resist their endless variation? They enhance our experience and frame what we find meaningful.  Across the globe, plants are de rigueur for interiors. Why, then, have they disappeared from our museums and galleries?

Up to the late 1970s, we treated galleries no differently than our drawing rooms, providing comfortable padded benches and fans of potted ferns.  Looking through the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s archive, we see rows of flower pots forming room dividers and artfully placed sprouting pots echoing neighboring artwork.  Straight angles become curved with ranks of spiky dragon trees and paintings are framed with breezy fans of umbrella bonsais, dramatic shapes in negative space. You’d be hard-put to find a Picasso without its accompanying palm.  Aside from stylistic preferences, what could be the reason for changing our allegiance, our galleries made void of botanical decoration?

The obvious answer is conservation.  Plants attract insects, and insects cause problems for artworks and are a nuisance for visitors. Over the last fifty years, conservators have convinced curators that the plants have to go.  Plants can bring in pests such as carpet beetles, web-enclosed moths, termites, and other wood-boring insects. Given time, these pests can cause serious damage. With the challenges artworks endure from normal exposure, from light levels, temperature changes, and fluctuating humidity, why would we further tempt fate? 
 

Not to say that plants don’t still make the occasional appearance. In an odd switch, they’ve disappeared as decoration and reappeared as artwork. In a current LACMA exhibition, “Rauschenberg: The ¼ Mile”, an agave plant sits front and center, possibly a nod to plants Robert Rauschenberg encountered on his ¼ mile walk to his studio in Captiva, Florida.  The plant is replaced anew in every city the exhibit is shown in, and not necessarily with an agave every time. The plant sets the scene, but it also brings in gnats. No one wants to be accompanied by gnats when they walk through an exhibit. Conservators treat the plants before installation, thoroughly inspecting every stem and applying Safer Soap to the leaves when necessary.  But even with this close inspection the bugs still get in, and without natural predators in the galleries, they can still thrive. More of an annoyance than an actual threat, they’re still an ongoing challenge. With more installations featuring site representational work, whether it be recreating the Eames office in LACMA’s 2012 “California Design 1930-1965: Living in a Modern Way,”  or the contemplative habitats in its 2017 exhibition, “Home - So Different So Appealing,” plants have made somewhat of a comeback. It is improbable, however, that they will ever be employed as mere decoration to galleries again, given their insect attraction.

The less obvious answer to the disappearance of gallery plants has to do with aesthetics and the art market.  Our view of artwork has changed dramatically over the last 100 years. The invention of photography made realism so achievable that artists reached in the opposite direction: their visions became more and more abstract in expression, leading to minimal mark-making and flat color fields, and experimentation with many different means and materials to express an idea.  The entrenched tenets of direct representational art became obsolete and popular art became an unpredictable affair, appealing to any and every level of appreciation.  Artworks are now, more than ever, desirable objects of great value, with potentially immense monetary worth. Works of art are no longer seen as contemplative reflections, even as they are created from the human experience, but as potential star vehicles with the ability to bring astronomical sales in the art market.  In May 2019, Jeff Koons’ steel “Rabbit” sold for more than $91 million, a heretofore unheard-of amount for a single artwork from a living artist. Somewhere along the way, ironically, art has become a commodity, like the Dutch tulips of the 17th century, speculated on and sold to the highest bidders.

How does that pertain to plants? Plants are decorative – perhaps it’s guilt by association.  In recent years, Fine Art has developed a separation from Decorative Art, which covers a wide array of decorative materials that are functional in nature, such as furniture, ceramics, wallpaper and screens, textiles, rugs, and curtains.  These materials realize much less on the art market than works of Fine Art, regardless of changing tastes. Conceptualization trumps use. On the whole, if an artwork has a functional purpose or history, such as a chair or nineteenth century cabinet, then it is not assigned as much value as more purely aesthetic works.   In some ways, the value of Fine Art depends on this distinction, and so decorative elements, like the use of plants to frame work, are to be shunned.

So you won’t see a painting at your local art gallery enhanced with a potted plant nearby - who would dare decorate a potential masterpiece and devalue its market worth? Get rid of those ferns and flowers – they could degrade your investment.

Images of past exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Be it conservation or mounting art market hysteria, plants in modern galleries have gone the way of the Dodo.  They have disappeared as decorative gallery elements and have occasionally found their way into the artwork itself. We can’t expect to see them again soon, but we can expect to see further changes in the way we view art, if the last 100 years is any indication.

Christel Quinn is the Manager of the Conservation Center at LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art).