Evil Flowers

“Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) by Charles Baudelaire is one of the milestones of world literature. First published in Paris in 1857, the volume caused a scandal that led to Baudelaire being taken to court. Despite these less than auspicious beginnings, the poems were to have an enormous impact. In literature as well as in art, they laid the foundations for a new aesthetic that overturned the traditional idea of the oneness of the beautiful and the good. Taking Odilon Redon’s charcoal drawing Fleur du Mal (c. 1890) in the Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection as its starting point, the exhibition takes the visitor on a journey through the art of the early modernist period all the way to contemporary works that shed light on the various aspects of Baudelaire’s aesthetics as well as its after- and side effects. …”