EDWARD STEICHEN, Flowers on a Gold Background

Before World War I Edward Steichen and his family lived in Voulangis, a small village outside Paris. His garden there became a kind of laboratory for the development of his ideas about painting and photography and he used its landscape and flowers as the primary subject of his work. It was also during this time that Steichen, while continuing to embrace abstraction, developed his interest in mathematical theory and geometry. Influenced by a theoretician named Jay Hambidge, and eager to know more about botany and mathematics, Steichen used his garden to study the ratios of plant growth and structure. He had come to believe that the laws of nature were based on the proportions of the triangle within a rectangle and that through this theory of ratios he would find nature’s “golden mean”, or perfect ratio. Steichen used gold leaf to highlight the arched forms and strong angular shapes in Flower Study on Gold, 1917, as he progressed further towards abstraction. Three years later, Steichen would fully realize the theory of “the golden mean” in his seminal painting Le Tournesol, 1917 (National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.), the geometric abstract portrait of a golden sunflower bent over the neck of a wide-mouthed vase.