Blumen for Flowers
written by: Jianan Z
If flowers once passively became female painters’ genre in the seventeenth century, then why did Miss L even ask me to go to the Blumencafé? I suddenly recalled her while gazing at Michaelina Wautier’s Flower Garland with a Butterfly. It’s tranquilly beautiful.
“Blumen,” plural, is the German noun for “flowers.” I would never associate Miss L with flowers. Her main photo on Tinder was coloured, quite heavy-metal and Rock ’n’ Roll style: standing on a foggy stage, leaning forward, holding the microphone with one hand, the other hand with stretched fingers fire-like in the air, eyes tightly closed, mouth widely open, appearing to scream at her audience. She told me she had a metal soul and liked K-pop, which I would not have expected to have anything to do with flowers. Yet she said she always wanted to try the Blumencafé.
Blumen? It seemed to me self-contradictory, like no expert would believe that Michaelina actually painted these flowers until credible evidence was discovered. More than four hundred years ago, men said that only women could be so giftedly uncreative in nurturing their flowers, as they still say today. That’s why I disbelieved Miss L would be fascinated by flowers as a metal lady, as I’ve been taught to think like a feminist.
So I unmatched her after we agreed to date at a sushi bar called Shibuya.
Still, I went there, sat alone at a square table for two at our planned time.
I faced a full wall of the same little golden and shiny maneki-nekos with neither Miss L nor flowers. There were also no other museum visitors moving around while security warned them not to take pictures, which was disturbing while I was with Michaelina’s flowers. She was never married, and her paintings were attributed to men, including her brother, Charles, for she painted far more than fair.
“Jianan, you know, if a female classical guitarist wants to be successful in this field, she must play like a man,” said a professor I once knew.
Lamentably, this same claptrap has been chronically universal. It makes sense now that nobody thought Michaelina would paint these flowers since her other paintings of the “male genre” were, at least, “as excellent as” men. Nevertheless, I would forget her witty The Five Senses, snarky The Triumph of Bacchus, and other weighty portraits of male figures for her flowers. Not because her flowers vividly reminded me of Miss L and the Blumencafé, where I went alone on Valentine’s Day. Instead, it was the colourful, floral delicacy that poetically connected two unknown animal skulls with a petite, translucent butterfly drifting above slightly to the upper-right. Michaelina might have painted only two flower garlands, since they’re the only ones that survive today. If discourse circulates around the idea that flowers are women’s motif, should they be emancipated from it in the name of feminism? Like I always swiped right when I saw “swipe right ONLY if you’re a feminist!” And I sometimes swiped left if I had seen the same statement too often, like they were copy-pasted. If I were a well-lectured male feminist, out of political correctness, I would have been neither attracted to Michaelina’s flowers nor to Miss L’s Blumencafé. Therefore, I think I’m not, as I enjoyed both.
Last December, Miss L and I matched for the first time on Tinder, and I remember all her photos were then black and white, but she forgot me. She said she was in another depression episode and was just unable to respond. I understood. And as her photos now turned coloured, I assumed it signified her emerging from the darkness. I wouldn’t enjoy flowers that are black and white, like I wouldn’t enjoy a funeral, even if it’s not mine. But I did enjoy my second chance to chat with her, as I do when looking at Michaelina’s flower garlands hung between dead animals’ skulls, painted in 1652, time after time: skulls, leaves, lively flowers, the bee, butterfly, dragonfly, and fly. For Shakespeare, they are called the “eternal lines.”
So, is there anything wrong with Michaelina and flowers?
And, is there anything wrong with the metal lady L and Blumen?
Men were lectured to think flowers belonged to female painters’ easels, brushes, and pigments for hundreds of years, then lectured against it. Who doesn’t rebel should swipe left. I love both metal and flowers. However, I hate K-pop. My right index fingertip gently touched the unmatch button, and the “L” just vanished from the list.
- Blumen for Flowers - July 22, 2026
- Second Chances: Chapter Two - April 16, 2026
- Second Chances - January 5, 2026
