THE LATE BRITISH ART connoisseur Kenneth Clark published memorable books on the landscape and human figure in painting. Yet he seemingly ignored the topic of still life. Granted, he was a busy man, being an Oxford professor and head of Britain’s National Gallery.
Still life, as the Clark case suggests, has long been the poor cousin of painting. Being a concatenation of inanimate objects, it has been subordinated to the higher world of historical events and Nature. Yet as visual a problem for the painter, and as a vehicles to talk about everyday life, the still life is nonpareil.
In the humdrum life department, the Greco-Roman painters had include cups, vessels, and grapes in their art. And so it was, as the Italian Renaissance rediscovered the classical past, still life gained new attention. Before this, still life can be described as merely the stage props for medieval art’s portrayal of saints, kings, and bishops.
Renaissance-era citizens had become consumers. So the portrayal of household objects rose in fascination. Portrait painting remained king, but ordinary objects added symbols to the persons portrayed. The baroque period that followed in the late 1500s was the real seedbed of the modern still life—sundry objects painted for their own sake.
Leave it to the Dutch, a very commercial folk, to advance this approach. Between Italy and the northern lands, settings with table ware, food, and utensils celebrated the mundane. With the new innovation of oil paint, the still life painter’s goal was make the ordinary look extraordinary.
Up to the neoclassical period in French academic art, a hierarchy of painting had been well established. At the top was history painting. It portrayed a classical, heroic past, with mythical and royal figures: storied cities and ruins, epic tales of love and valor. Portraiture remained a close second in rank. And while landscape was last in status, still life was barely ahead.
Nevertheless, still life allowed for fascinating innovations. Collected objects, as symbols, could tell a story. Fruits and vegetable could be used for comic ends—as with the baroque painting of faces made by onions, cucumbers, tomatoes and the like. Flowers in themselves became new, challenging things to render, bolstered by the new sciences that studied floral species.
And of course, there were the paintings of schatzkammer (cabinet of treasures) and Wunderkammer (cabinets of wonders), which depicted rare, diverse, and opulent objects. From there the field was wide open—hunting themes, with foul and guns, for example—and any shiny metal object reflecting light in interesting ways.
Thanks to the rise of modernism, beginning with Impressionists and reaching a peroration in the Cubists, still life offered something unique: a clear cut composition. Hard objects and clear edges in space became ideal studies of shadow and light.
The apogee of the still life was probably seen in the work of the still-traditional painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779). Its minimalist peak was reached in the high-key simplicity of bottles on tables painted endlessly by Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) in Italy.
Nearly all modernist painters explored such tableaus—real and imaginary. Still life also offered an avenue to humor. Painters could put together incongruous objects, creating the kind of cognitive dissonance that is the essence of a good joke. Surrealists made this their credo—discordant objects only!
For growing bourgeois tastes, Henri Matisse said, “Art should be something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue.” He was probably referring more to still life than to his odalisques, that is, those lounging, exotic women.
Finally, it’s not for nothing that the mid-twentieth century American “colorist” school of painting, led by Charles Hawthorne and Henry Hensche, was unapologetically dogmatic in its choice of cups, vases, apples, children’s blocks, and other humdrum fare as subject matter. Such objects were to be painted in full outdoor sunlight. Only thus could the relations of edges and colors be seen with absolute clarity.
Now, still life is mainstream, both as modernist and traditional subject matter. As it is often said, a painting of flowers on a table sells best (while history painting is passé, relegated to dusty museum collections). In short, Kenneth Clark has been trumped.