“[Warhol’s Flowers create] a virtual, painful stillness. Since they seemingly only live on the surface, in the stasis of their coloration, they also initiate only the one metamorphosis which is a fundamental tenet of Warhol’s work: moments in a notion of transience. The flower pictures were for Everyman, they embodied Warhol’s power of concretization, the shortest possible route to stylization, both open to psychological interpretation and an ephemeral symbol. But the flowers…were also to be read as metaphors for the flowers of death. Warhol’s flowers resist every philosophical transfiguration as effectively as the pictures of disasters and catastrophes, which they now seem ever closer to.”