War and the Visual Language of Flowers: An Antipodean Perspective
ASIA--PACIFIC, 21 Apr 2014
Ann Elias – TRANSCEND Media Service
Every year, on April 25th—‘Anzac Day’—Australians and New Zealanders celebrate the moment in history when the Anzacs (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) landed at Gallipoli in 1915 to help win the war in Europe. They were known, in Edwardian terms, as the ‘flower of manhood’. The Anzacs brought honour to Australia and New Zealand, two remote British colonies in the Antipodes, by proving that both countries had matured into free nations capable of sending fighting forces to help their allies abroad. Today the ‘Anzac poppy’ is still worn proudly in both countries to remember those who fought and died in the First World War, and to mark a turning point in national consciousness.1
For those of us who live in the Antipodes, the Anzac poppy is an emotive symbol and it is the catalyst for this study which looks at the significance and symbolism of floral imagery to the war imagination, and at the incongruity of flowers—which popularly signify innocence and beauty—within military contexts. My interest is in the imaginative and ritualistic figuring of flowers in war’s remembrance and commemoration, as well as its protest. I integrate analysis of imagery from the fields of art, photography and popular culture, with commentary about the significances of the floral and the pastoral cited in literary theory.2 Much of the visual material belongs to Australian and British war archives and war collections, but inclusion is also made of contemporary artists who utilize floral imagery in their protest of war. The First World War is treated as an historical touchstone as the war that brought the poppy, and battlefield wildflower, into proper focus as dramatic subjects for representation, and as vivid perceptual experiences for soldiers. Paul Fussell cautions us, however, not to explain our fascination with the poppy too simplistically by the fact that poppies were there on Flanders fields.3 Its potential as a rhetorical device to reinforce the values of fraternity and sacrifice was obvious from the outset. The poppy belongs to a class of objects that has been described as ‘a visual short-hand to represent shared ideals and to launch an immediate appeal to the audience’s sense of a national community’.4 And its rhetoric extends beyond national bound aries. In its most abstract representation as an artificial flower the poppy is part of an expressive international syntax of war. It has been carved into and painted onto public sites across the world, from remote stone memorials in regional Australia, to the large murals on the walls of Memory Hall in the Liberty Memorial in Kansas City.
An effective example of the rhetorical power of this flower is an Australian photograph of a Lighthorseman collecting poppies on the battlefields of Palestine in 1918. It tells us that war is not for nothing and death will always be remembered through the loyalty of men. Frank Hurley was an official war artist, and this is one of the rare colour photographs to emerge from the First World War.5 The image gains its emotional power from the way the soldier holds the flowers close to his body but also from their vivid redness which signals the heightened emotion of passion. When Charles A. Hill writes about ‘the psychology of rhetorical images’ he stresses the importance of vividness to their persuasiveness.
… vivid language makes a persuasive message easier to comprehend and more likely to be remembered, but only if the vivid elements are clearly and explicitly relevant to the image itself.6
The poppy’s vivid saturated redness allows a direct relationship between its colour and the subject of war sacrifice. Without the redness signifying blood the photograph would not speak as clearly about the good of sacrifice or about ideals of manhood. It impresses upon us that comradeship, loyalty and solidarity are passionately felt. This is a display of the Australian ideology of ‘mateship’ which became central to the Australian masculine psyche following the War, and which is recorded in every influential account of Australian history since that time.
In the narrower sense ‘mates’ are men who are thrown together by some emergency in an unfriendly environment and have become of one blood in facing it. In this sense its use is strongest in the unions and in the armed forces. Mates stick together in their adversity and their common interest. Mateship of this kind is not a theory of universal brotherhood but of the brotherhood of particular men.7
It would be wrong to imply that the depiction of soldiers among poppies is culturally-specific to Australian men, or to Australian military photography and the First World War. It is also part of British pictorial history and examples can be found in war archives of the Second World War, which suggests that a type of naturalization of the relationship of uniformed soldiers and red poppies has taken place in western cultures. However, while the British example proves that the image of the blood-red poppy in close proximity to soldiers in uniform is not specifically Australian, there is a perception among Australians that it is unique to them which explains why tourist advertisers treat the image of poppies and soldiers as one of the country’s most valuable commodities. It does not even matter if the flower that is shown is not the Flanders poppy, since any red poppy will trigger the right chain of signification to nationalistic history. Whether military or civilian, these images, which are designed to speak of male camaraderie and loyalty, are often so richly infused with desire through the touch and intimacy of men with flowers that they venture, perhaps inadvertently, into a sexualised domain. Paul Fussell was one of the first historians of war to discuss the often-taboo subject of homoeroticism in relation to the poppy.
For half a century before the fortuitous publicity attained by the poppies of Flanders, this association with homoerotic love had been conventional, in the works by Wilde, Douglas, the Victorian painter Simeon Solomon, John Addington Symonds, and countless others. No “poppy” poem or reference emerging from the Great War could wholly shake off that association. When Sassoon notes that “the usual symbolic scarlet poppies lolled over the sides of the communication trench” he is aware, as we must be, that they symbolize something more than bloodshed and oblivion.8
In his ethnographic study of the culture of flowers, Jack Goody describes the Flanders poppy as a ‘strongly marked flower’ for the impact it has made on the popular mind, within Western rituals of remembrance, for those who fought and died in wars after 1915.9 Goody does not find it necessary to differentiate between the natural poppy and the artificial one, probably because the two are so successfully enmeshed as one symbolic entity in our imaginations. War rituals have co-opted the basic aesthetic of Papaver rhoeas and turned it into a flattened schematic artificial form consisting of a black centre and red surround usually in the shape of a quatrefoil, sometimes with green stalk and leaf. But peace ceremonies post-dating 1933 have appropriated the white poppy.10 Such is the power of the aesthetics of colour and form that in Australia, Britain, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States the red poppy and the white poppy express two opposing views on the morality of war: the red poppy embodies the national soul, the celebration of history, and the commemoration of sacrifice through blood that was spilt for the freedom of the nation; the white poppy makes a judgment about the other commenting that it romanticises the ideology of nation-states and glosses over the actuality that their histories are soaked in blood. But so mutable is the flower as cultural sign, and so complex the realm of aesthetics, that the red poppy alone is able to configure the military body in contradictory ways as heroic, ruined, and also sexualised.
The drama and symbolism of the poppy’s sanguine flesh and black centre, a ‘well’ that seems to bear the gaze of the dead, has been remarked upon so often that there seems no possible way to speak about it outside clichés. Yet the possibility that it can be expressed afresh never fails to allure. In 1992, Caron Schwartz Ellis was ‘startled’ by the profusion of artificial poppies at The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, and unable to ignore the impact of their ‘blood red’ colour she described the Memorial as
the burial place of Vietnam, a place infused with the blood of the Vietnam vet. Blood with its implicit taboo and power, symbol both of the potentiality of life and of the finality of death, is imagined in the stunning red of the poppy.11
Underpinning the authority of the poppy is its clear and vivid form that allows our thoughts to concentrate on the simplicity of its language in an effort to comprehend the meaning of war. But the poppy is deceptively simple, and hidden behind its clarity and vivacity is an unfathomable reality. This is why the subject of the poppy is returned to repetitively: no representation of it is adequate just as no representation of war can express it sufficiently. The other reason for the poppy’s allure is its contradictory nature or double language which comes as a revelation to many, despite nearly a century in which it has functioned as the official Western memorial flower, has elicited passionate responses from artists, and has been the subject of stimulating scrutiny in literary criticism. Whether in its natural form or its artificial form the poppy is fascinating because it has the ability to commemorate in an abstract way the ‘glorious dead’, but in a visceral way the damaged bodies of soldiers.
Claudette Sartiliot has written one of the few philosophical texts devoted to the subject of flowers and she observes that it is in their nature to embody double meanings, since flowers are male and female in one, and when cut they become mobile metaphors that do not denote any fixed identity.12 In war imagery they oscillate between the beautiful and the ugly, the masculine and the feminine, death and love, and the transcendent as well as the abject. They are simultaneously symbols of grief for the slain, and symbols of hope about life’s renewal. Sartiliot describes the flower as a unique entity that
seems to have no topos, no clear or real place, no role. If flowers are traditionally—& as literary emblems, primordially—associated with feminine beauty, life, & innocence, they shift in the same texts into their opposite.13
Writers from Proust to Derrida have seized upon the flower’s cultural mutability and abundant significations, including Jean Genet whose writing explores the poetic co-dependence of opposites embodied in blossoms. Genet speaks of flowers as ‘gaiety and some are sadness become flowers’.14 Among the First World War poets who examined the lyrical potential in the paradoxes of the flower are McCrae (In Flanders Fields), Sassoon (The Death-Bed), and Read (A Short Poem for Armistice Day). They have also shown us that war is one of the few realms where flowers break from convention and signify the bodies of men.
While it is conventional to regard the flower as pure and innocent, in reality—and the poppy proves this—it is one of the most knowing and politically-overlaid objects in western history.15 But because flowers are persistently connected with innocence, many commentators including Caron Ellis, cited above, claim to have been startled, frozen, and dazed by their unexpected appearance in war imagery. Some, including Jasleen Dhamija, have been jolted from their preconceptions about the gentleness of flowers through floral designs that look war-like, and war images that look flower-like. She describes the experience of sudden shock when the beautiful yellow blossoms decorating a contemporary Afghan rug revealed themselves on closer inspection as bursting gun shells: ‘I shivered and something within me froze’.16 Dhamija was psychologically immobilised by the transmutation of the image of the innocent flower into image of lethal weaponry, and while this felt like a violation, as if her own innocence had been corrupted, the experience was also cathartic. It shook her into sudden realisation about the anguish in the lives of Afghan women caught in war, including those who had woven these ‘flowers of death’ into their rugs.
The strategy of attracting viewers through the disarming spectacle of the flower in order to repel them about war is a calculated risk that contemporary artists are willing to take in the cause of peace. The risk they take is to inadvertently make war and its consequences beautiful, and it could be argued, that such is the binary relationship of beauty and ugliness that their objective is destined to fail and succeed equally, just as photographs of atomic explosions are destined to look beautiful and terrible simultaneously. For this reason Colombian artist Juan Manuel Echavarría relies on the morality of the viewer to separate good from evil.17 For a series of black and white photographs titled ‘The Flower Vase Cut’ Echavarría arranged human bones to resemble botanical specimens. The title of his work is taken from a practice in the Colombian civil war of the 1940’s and 1950’s when the ‘Flower Vase Cut’ was the name of a mutilation practice where amputated limbs were packed into the necks of decapitated corpses to resemble vases of flowers. His aim was to create
… something so beautiful that people would be attracted to it. The spectator would come near it, look at it, and then when he or she realizes that it is not a flower as it seemed, but actually a flower made of human bones—something must click in the head, or in the heart, I hope.18
Echavarría’s photography is a protest against violence but while he hopes that this will be apparent to the audience, and that they will look beyond the beauty of the floral aesthetic and recognise that it is only a camouflage, he also fears that in coopting the beautiful to speak about the ugly the work risks misinterpretation. Given the clear definition of bones, the subject of the work is unlikely to be misread as a protest of the deadliness of war. However as a protest of war, the work lacks the unequivocal and unambiguous impact of other forms of public dissent in which the flower plays a vital role. The delicacy and liveliness of flowers have considerable ability to throw into relief the chill of war, and no example of the impact of this contrast can surpass the placing of pink carnations into the barrels of military guns by United States pacifists protesting the Vietnam War, and photographed on the steps of the Pentagon by Bernie Boston for Life magazine in 1967.19
The effectiveness of the flower in the protest of war relies on its morphology: a fragile body with human-like head. It is easily broken, and in addition it is soft and yielding, qualities that place it in binary opposition to war machinery. This was remarked upon in a review of the 1956 film adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Frank R. Silbajoris criticised the film’s director, King Vidor, for failing to represent the subtleties of Tolstoy’s commentary on war, and in particular the author’s intention to further the cause of peace. But there was one scene that Silbajoris found exceptional and satisfying, and which startled him.
There is one shot in the film expressing the preposterous meaninglessness of war so well that it comes to the viewer as a surprise: Pierre’s hand dropping the poppy flower just as the first canon of Borodino crashes through the quiet of the summer day.20
The ‘preposterous meaninglessness of war’ was impressed upon Silbajoris by the startling juxtaposition of beauty and violence, and in particular of passivity in the dropping flower and aggression in the propelling weaponry. The conjunction of delicate nature and violent warfare is ‘surreal’ in effect because the unexpected are brought together in radical collision, like the strange and convulsive drawings, the exquisite corpse, invented by the Surrealists following the First World War, and which, not coincidentally, are suggestive of dismemberment, just as cut flowers are. In certain contexts such as war’s remembrance, and war’s protest, flowers that have been severed from the ground have the ability to remind us that ‘men like flowers are cut’.21
This is precisely why George Bataille, who was associated with the Surrealists, and who served briefly in the army during the First World War, wrote The Language of Flowers (1929), a subversive essay using the anti-romantic image of a dismembered flower to shock the human world into facing rather than repressing the reality of death. Bataille’s essay criticises the human custom of avoiding the subject of death by projecting its destiny with death onto the beauty of flowers, which are made symbols of the ephemerality of human life.22 By exaggerating the hidden implication of the flower’s vitality which is its imminent decay Bataille employs the allegory of the flower to reveal how easily human ideals of everlasting beauty and purity are subverted by the actuality that this beautiful object ‘is risen from the stench of the manure pile—even though it seemed for a moment to have escaped it in a flight of angelic and lyrical purity’.23 The image of the rotting flower prevents it from conveying any of the conventional ideals of flowers as innocent, beautiful, and peaceful since they are ‘doomed to die almost as soon as they bloom, they wither sadly on the stem in rank disorder, eventually falling to the ground from which they came’.24
Once flowers start to rot they become inappropriate to the conventional rituals of public commemorations of war and sacrifice because they undermine idealisations of nature and human life. They look out of place on war memorials where the careful control of symbolism is designed to take the mind into an abstract realm and where, it has been argued, even ‘fixating on the marble effigy [is] a way of blocking the memory of torn human bodies’.25 Memorials are best decorated with wreaths woven with fresh or artificial flowers to signify victory in death and eternal life. Although fresh flowers on wreaths will die the wreath continues to retain its form and therefore its symbolism. When informal bunches of flowers decay they become literal signs of death, and take the imagination into the realm of melancholy. They work against the symbolism of everlasting memory and even conspire to turn the dead into victims, which is the role of anti-memorials.
Contemporary protests of war use the floral in ways that are likely to undermine the institutions of war. ‘Pale Armistice’ (1991), a sculpture by British artist Rozanne Hawksley, takes the form of a wreath, but the foliage and flowers, usually symbols of everlasting memory, are simulated by empty gloves and divert the mind to the macabre by signifying the missing bodies of men and women killed in wartime. The gloves, which are interspersed with bones and artificial flowers, form a ghostly circle, alternately amiable in the way they seem to greet each other, and desperate in the way they clutch each other. The work returns a gaze that scrutinizes us, asking us to fathom the sense of war.
The return of the gaze is a powerful strategy in war art where the intention is to arrest our attention, as if we are being spoken to. The most logical transmission of the gaze is through the representation of a human eye, but the centres of flowers are equally as effective.
Genet talks of the ‘deep gaze’ at the centre of the rose, but he is just one of many writers who have remarked upon the active power that emanates from the recess of every flower, as it fixes us in its gaze and makes us the object of its stare.26 When John Ruskin wrote ‘The Flower’ in Proserpina (1875) he described looking deeply into the cup of the poppy and being drawn into its heart. He described the poppy as ‘a scarlet cup, perfect-edged all round, seen among the wild grass far away, like a burning coal fallen from Heaven’s altars’.27 He deified flowers, and thought of the poppy as the most ‘complete’ of all due to the symbolic connection, as he saw it, between its red cup and the blood of Christ. Ruskin regarded the cup of the flower as an encoded deified entity but others regard the cup, or face, of the flower as analogous to a human head with an eye that stares back like the poppies in John McCrae’s In Flanders Fields.28 The head of the flower resembles a human head, and this is why the earliest western still life paintings of flowers were painted on the backs of portraits.29
George Lambert who sketched Gal ipoli Wildflowers on the battlefields at Gallipoli in 1919 was a portrait painter as well as an official war artist for Australia. In this flower painting he has accentuated the cups of the flowers and positioned them so that we look into their centres. Because Gal ipoli Wildflowers was painted on the battlefields where thousands of Australians died and were symbolically returned to the earth, the flowers seem animated with the spirits of the dead and the painting supports Elaine Scarry’s view that the flower’s face is more perfect for imagining than the faces of people.30 But there are at least two competing readings here: one hopeful about regeneration because the dead are like flowers, part of the cycle of life and death; the other pessimistic about the violence and finality of death since soldiers are like flowers: they can be cut down, and when this happens they decay. It is impossible to ignore that the flowers that we look into in Lambert’s painting, which are anemones and poppies, were once rooted in the ground at Gallipoli and shared that place with thousands of dead bodies. The flowers seized his attention just as a field of wildflowers seized the attention of two Australian soldiers in France a year before. The two men seem to be communing through the cups of the flowers with the dead who lie under the earth, an interpretation that is framed by the history of literature where the cups of flowers are passages to the underworld and the unconscious. Elaine Scarry writes about the cup of the anemone facilitating a passage from the living to the dead when discussing D.H. Lawrence’s version of the mythological story of Persephone:
The concave blossom also reappears in D.H. Lawrence’s account of the rape of Persephone, pursued by the underworld in the flowers that suddenly emerge on the surface of the ground and seize our attention as they seize Persephone herself: ‘purple anemones / Caverns / Little hells of colour / caves of darkness’. The ungraspable expanse of the underworld can suddenly (as Addison promised) be taken-in in a single glance in the shape of the anemone.31
The men are immersed in a field of living flowers, and the image is romantic because the mood is both melancholic and contemplative. It communicates about an eternal cycle of death and rebirth, the unity between man and the universe, and the idea that war is a natural part of this relationship. But it overstates the pastoral, which lends support to George Mosse’s argument that exaggerated appropriations of nature during war were a reassuring means of pointing ‘homeward, to a life of innocence and peace’.32 And it also lends support to Paul Fussell’s argument that ‘if the opposite of war is peace, the opposite of experiencing moments of war is proposing moments of pastoral’.33 Pastoral moments are distractions from the claustrophobia of warfare and allow temporary transcendence through the innocence and purity of nature. But by immersing themselves in the particularities of beauty, the soldiers invoke the opposite, the horror or war, since Fussell also reminds us that the pastoral is merely ‘a code to hint by antithesis at the indescribable’.34
Because the Western philosophical tradition genders flowers as feminine, the depiction of men immersed in a floral, pastoral and organic world invokes the feminine. And because flowers readily signify sexuality, being the sexual organs of plants, the image of two men touching flowers is erotically charged and this in turn eroticises their friendship. Santanu Das has written extensively on the subject of touch and intimacy in First World War literature to argue that in times of crisis, touch becomes central to war experience.35 In addition the image emphasises Michael Roper’s argument that manliness was ‘reformulated’ in the First World War.36 And it supports John Ibson’s research into relationships between United States soldiers where he argues that the Great War fostered more intimacy than civilian life, and that photographs taken in France in particular speak ‘powerfully about closeness engendered by the war’.37
I have tried to show that war is one context where men and flowers have an intimate relationship, and that this is not simply because flowers commemorate the war dead, but also because they mediate the complexity of human emotions and relationships. The red Flanders poppy is the most prevalent war flower in modern western history. Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmer argue that objects such as the poppy, which have exceptional exposure as symbols, ‘resist individualistic interpretation because they are over-determined by customary usage’.38 But while the symbolism of the poppy is widely known, this has not prevented artists and keen observers from repeatedly trying to individualise their responses to it. The red poppy is a powerful vehicle for communicating about life and death, and while poets and philosophers have pondered existential questions through many species of flowers and plants, it is difficult to imagine the blood-red poppy losing its authority, despite the challenge that the white poppy of peace tries to bring to it. Nationalism depends on the symbolism and aesthetic of red which enfolds not only visceral references to the dead but also historical references to Flanders fields. However, the red poppy that increasingly emerges today as symbol of contemporary war, and its aftermath, is the cultivated narcotic poppy from Afghanistan. The Flanders poppy and the Afghanistan poppy symbolise two different eras of warfare, but in both cases, their image embodies the melancholy of the human condition which is the struggle between war and peace.
NOTES:
1. Unlike the United States where poppies are worn on Memorial Day, in New Zealand they are worn on April 25, Anzac Day, while in Australia, like Britain and Canada, they are worn on November 11, Remembrance Day (or Armistice Day). Anzac Day is commemorated in Australia by the wearing of sprigs of rosemary to symbolise everlasting memory.
2. Three images from the col ection of the Australian War Memorial were also published in Ann Elias, ‘War Flowers and Visual Culture: the First World War Col ection of the Australian War Memorial’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial, 40 (2007), http://www.awm.gov.au/journal/j40/elias.htm, 1-12.3. Paul Fussel , The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000: first published 1975), 247.
4. Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers (eds.), Defining Visual Rhetorics (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004), 4.
5. See Captured in Colour: rare photographs from the First World War, (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 2003).
6. Charles A. Hil , ‘The psychology of rhetorical images’, in Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers (eds.), Defining Visual Rhetorics (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004), 32.
7. Donald Horne, The Lucky Country (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books, 1988: first published 1964), 32.
8. Paul Fussel , The Great War and Modern Memory (2000), 248.
9. Jack Goody, The Culture of Flowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 298.
10. ‘Remembrance: why the poppy?’, BBC: Religion and Ethics, <http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/
remembrance/history/poppy.shtml> (accessed 17 April 2007).
11. Caron Schwrartz El is, ‘So Old Soldiers Don’t Fade Away: the Vietnam Veterans Memorial’, Journal of American Culture, 1/5 (1992), 27.
12. Claudette Sartiliot, Herbarium Verbarium: the discourse of flowers (Lincoln, London: The University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 17.
13. Ibid. 248 War, Literature & the Arts
14. Jean Genet, Miracle of the Rose, trans. Bernard Frechtman (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1971), 226.
15. The social significances of flowers is the subject of Jack Goody’s, The Culture of Flowers (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1993).
16. Jasleen Dhamija, ‘This Space is Mine’, in The Rugs of War (Canberra: The Australian National University, 2003) 6 . <http://www.anu.edu.au/ITA/CSA/publications/Whole_TROW.rtf> (Accessed 03/23/2007).
17. Echavarría is discussed, and his work reproduced, in Michael Taussig, ‘The language of flowers’, Critical Inquiry, 30 (Autumn 2003)
18. Michael Taussig, ‘The language of flowers’, Critical Inquiry, 30 (Autumn 2003), 99.
19. Reproduced in David E. Scherman, The Best of Life (New York: Avon Books, 1973), 257.
20. Frank R. Silbajoris, ‘War and Peace on the Screen’, Col ege English, 18/1 (1956), 45.
21. Herbert Read, ‘A Short Poem for Armistice Day’, in Jon Silk (ed.), The Penguin Book of First
World War Poetry (London: Penguin Books, 1996: revised edition), 176.
22. Claudette Sartiliot, Herbarium Verbarium: the discourse of flowers (Lincoln, London: The
University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 81.
23. Batail e quoted in Jonathan P. Eburne, ‘That Obscure Object of Revolt: Heraclitus, Surrealism’s Lightning-Conductor’, Symploke 8/1-2 (2000), 189-190.
24. Michael Taussig, ‘The language of flowers’, Critical Inquiry, 30 (Autumn 2003), 118.
25. Katie Trumpener, ‘Memories Carved in Granite: Great War Memorials and Everyday Life’, PMLA, 115/5 (2000), 1101.
26. Jean Genet, Miracle of the Rose, trans. Bernard Frechtman (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1971), 274.
27. John Ruskin, ‘The Flower’ from Proserpina, in Dinah Birch (ed.), John Ruskin Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2004), 251-263.
28. McCrae, John, ‘In Flanders Fields’ in Jon Silkin (ed.), The Penguin Book of First World War Poetr, (London: Penguin, 1996: revised edition, first published 1979), 85.
29. Norbert Schneider, ‘The Early Floral Still Life’, in Hans-Michael Herzog (ed.) The Art of the Flower, the floral still life from the 17th to the 20th century (Germany: Edition Stemmlein\association with Kunsthal e Bielefeld, 1996), 16.
30. Elaine Scaarry, ‘Imagining Flowers: Perceptual Mimesis (Particularly Delphinium), Representations, 57 (Winter 1977), 105.
31. Ibid., 97.
32. George Mosse, Fal en Soldiers: reshaping the memory of the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 107.
33. Paul Fussel , The Great War and Modern Memory (2000), 231.
34. Ibid. 235.
35. Santanus Das, Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
36. Michael Roper, ‘Between Manliness and Masculinity: the “War Generation” and the Psychology of Fear in Britain, 1914-1950’, Journal of British Studies, 44/2 (2005), 357.
37. John Ibson, A Century of Male Relationships in Everyday American Photograph, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 94.
38. Charles A. Hil , ‘The psychology of rhetorical images’, (2004), 4.
______________________________
Ann Elias is a Senior Lecturer at Sydney College of the Arts, the University of Sydney, Australia. Her discipline is art history, with specialisations in still life and flower painting, camouflage, and aesthetics and war.
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 21 Apr 2014.
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