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The Chicago Symphony Orchestra chamber music concert July 22 is an auxiliary event for the Driehaus Museum’s “Rory McEwen: A New Perspective on Nature,” a traveling exhibit that explores the trailblazing career and legacy of Scottish artist Rory McEwen, whose work is considered one of the major turning points in the development of contemporary botanical art.
With more than 100 works, including sculpture and manuscripts, the exhibit, which opened May 16 and runs through Aug. 17 at the Driehaus Museum, 50 E. Erie, reveals how McEwen forged his own personal interpretation of 20th-century modernism, portraying flowers, leaves and vegetables as individual subjects worthy of their own portraits.
To support the exhibit, the Driehaus Museum has partnered with groups across Chicagoland on public programs, classes and exhibits, including Brushwood Center at Ryerson Woods, Chicago Botanic Garden, Chicago Scots, the Magnificent Mile Association, Morton Arboretum, Old Town School of Folk Music, Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum and the CSO.
“There are pictures of flowers, and there is botanical art,” observes Ruth L.A. Stff, curator of International Exhibitions at London’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. “The latter requires a scientific eye for detail as well as artistry. Rory McEwen (1932–1982), considered the most significant botanical artist of the 20th century, had both.”
Stiff curated “A New Perspective on Nature,” which features 85 watercolors on loan from the Royal Botanic Gardens/Kew, Oak Spring Garden Foundation Collection, the Shirley Sherwood Collection and the McEwen Family Estate Collection, as well as private collections. Along with McEwen’s paintings and sculptures, the exhibit features works by botanical illustrators from the 17th and 18th centuries (Robert, Redouté, Ehret and Aubriet) and contemporary botanical artworks on loan from the Sherwood collections.
“Rory McEwen’s genius lies in his power to reassert the power of realism while infusing a modern sensibility into the centuries-old genre of botanical art,” Stiff said. “Now recognized as one of the standard bearers of today’s renaissance in botanical painting, McEwen changed the course of contemporary botanical art and inspired a whole new generation of artists.”
Most of McEwen’s paintings of tulips (at left) and other flowers feature a single blossom on its stalk — rendered in watercolor on vellum with vibrant color and vivid detail, using large empty backgrounds on which his plant portraits seem to float. They are considered to be among quintessential works of modern botanical art.
“I paint flowers as a way of getting as close as possible to what I perceive as the truth, my truth of the time in which I live,” McEwen once said. "By encompassing a rare ability to see a plant as more than ’just’ a plant — to imbue his paintings with a sense of his subject’s ’soul’ — his techniques have had a lasting impact on botanical artists today," Stiff said.
A true Renaissance man, McEwen lived a life as bold and colorful as his art. His governess taught him to draw from nature at a young age. He studied at Eton and Cambridge and played folk and blues music with his brother, Alex, before turning to a career as a visual artist. His paintings enthrall viewers not only for their hyperrealism but also for the unique perspective he brought to them, combining the accuracy of botanical illustration with the approach of a modern artist.
McEwen’s name has been appearing in artistic circles recently, as several of his paintings have been sold at auction. Recently, the portfolio Tulips & Tulipmania (The Basilisk Press, 1976), in which eight of the artist’s tulip lithographs are featured, sold in the Prints & Multiples sale on March 26 by London auction house Lyon & Turnbull for £2,016 ($2,601).
McEwen’s artistry extended to poetry, and most notably, music; he was a successful folk revivalist and host of the popular 1960s British music show, “Hullabaloo!” With his younger brother Alex, McEwen toured the United States and performed on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
The elder McEwen’s music had a major impact on budding talents such as Eric Clapton and Van Morrison. In 1957, McEwen became a regular on the BBC’s “Tonight,” watched by millions every evening. McEwen’s topical calypsos inspired Van Morrison to take up music. Fellow pop-culture tastemakers such as Eric Burdon, Eric Clapton and comic Billy Connolly all claimed they were infliuenced by McEwen on “Tonight” program.
In the 1960s, McEwen’s home in Chelsea became a mecca for artists, writers, poets and musicians, such as Ravi Shankar, George Harrison, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, the Everly Brothers, Ahmet Ertegün (head of Atlantic Records), Allen Ginsberg and Larry Adler. It was in Rory’s London house that a frequent guest, the sitar virtuoso Shankar first met another frequent visitor, George Harrison, and interested him in Indian music and thus diverted the Beatles in new directions
By 1965, after organizing the Keele Folk Festival, McEwen grew discouraged by the squabbles of the folk-music scene and gave up performing to concentrate on art. He continued in that field until his untimely death in 1982.
