Christopher Allen’s art history series: Still Life Part III
Still-life compositions can be as personal and expressive of the artist as they are of the time in which they lived.
After the still-life paintings of Chardin, there is little of comparable interest for almost a century. Neither neoclassicism, with its emphasis on political subjects drawn from antiquity, nor romanticism, with its own range of themes inspired by modern and medieval literature as well as contemporary politics, nor even realism, concerned with modern life, had much interest in pictures of things for their own sake.
Still-life motifs could, of course, play a role in serious narrative pictures, especially in identifying figures or situating the action in time and place. And, as we have already seen, they played an especially important role in narrative subjects from everyday life, which the 19th century tried to raise to the dignity of history painting; because the subjects of such pictures did not belong to a canon of shared stories, the artist was obliged to fill the composition with clues, inevitably in the form of still-life motifs.
There are, for example, countless details of furniture and household objects in a painting like Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience (1853), or Sir John Longstaff’s Breaking the News (1887), both of which were discussed here some weeks ago. Architecture, furniture, costume and other carefully reconstructed details are central to the academic realism of a picture like Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s A Juggler (1870) in the Art Gallery of NSW.
One of the most intriguing still lifes of the mid-19th century is in Delacroix’s late masterpiece, Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, completed in 1861 on a wall in the Church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris. On the lower right, Jacob seems to have piled up his clothes and straw hat before the confrontation: but it is impossible to look at this remarkable group without seeing an uncanny anticipation of van Gogh’s painting style, over a generation later, including the characteristic linear application of paint and even a straw hat. Delacroix was always admired as a supporter of mid-century modernists, and van Gogh would almost certainly have seen this fairly recent work when he was in Paris in 1886-87.
Manet painted a series of fine still-life pictures such as Carnations and Clematis (1883) when he was unwell in his last years, and perhaps this is why still life plays such an important part in The Bar at the Folies-Bergere (1882), painted a year before his death. In the foreground are two exquisitely painted flowers in a champagne glass, like an allusion to his recent work. But the bar is covered with other still-life motifs, including champagne bottles and a dish of oranges. The picture clearly suggests an analogy with the way the girl herself, as revealed in the tricky play of her mirrored reflection, is also being looked at as an object by the gentleman who is arranging to see her after work.
Manet’s and Whistler’s friend, Henri Fantin-Latour, one of the finest still-life specialists of the century, always had a way of painting flowers that was botanically accurate and yet avoided the pitfalls of botanical illustration, and in later works like Peonies (1891), an extraordinary sensibility to the character of the flowers is combined with a subdued palette and a simplified composition with a subtle play of shadows to evoke a poignant sense of intimacy.
In contrast to Fantin-Latour’s discretion and subtlety, van Gogh’s still-life compositions are overtly personal and expressive. Vincent, as he preferred to be called, had painted a number of still-life compositions during his early years in Holland and his brief period in Antwerp, including Still Life with Bible and Novel (1885), whose extinguished candle links it to the memento mori tradition. The novel is Emile Zola’s La Joie de vivre, published only the year before; despite its title, the story is one of unrelenting misery and of the struggle of goodness in the face of meanness and resentment — all themes that would have appealed to van Gogh after the disasters of his personal life over the previous four years.
Another composition from the same period includes Germinie Lacerteux (1865) by the Goncourt brothers and Bel-ami (1885) by Guy de Maupassant; the first a story of the misfortunes of a young girl, while the second tells of a fraudulent journalist who dodges all retribution to end up rich and famous.
He painted several more during the stay in Paris from 1886 to the spring of 1888, the period of his transition through impressionism to the distinctive style that he finally evolved in the south of France in 1888 and practised for little more than two years before his suicide in July 1890. One of several myths about van Gogh is that he laboured for years without recognition: the truth is that virtually all the pictures for which he is now famous were done in that very short period, and that if he had died in early 1888 he would barely be known today.
Van Gogh moved to the ancient Roman city of Arles in February 1888, and in May he rented four rooms in a building he called the Yellow House. One of the two upstairs bedrooms was his own, and the other was intended for his friend Gauguin, whom he urged to join him in forming a kind of artists’ colony. And the still-life compositions for which he is best known today were originally made as decorations for Gauguin’s bedroom.
He had already painted sunflowers on a table in Paris during the summer of 1887, and Gauguin owned two of these pictures, so it was natural to return to this subject for the bedroom. But the ones he painted in Paris are expressly cut off, drying out on a tabletop and so ultimately melancholy: the series in Arles are arranged in vases, full of life and solar energy, painted in a high key dominated by yellows and ochres.
There were four in the original series, one of which was destroyed in WWII, and the two best ones are in London and in Munich. Early in 1889, van Gogh made a series of copies of the two most successful originals, so the Amsterdam version is a repetition of the London one. He made many such duplicates in his last years, which can be confusing for the public, but it was one of the ways he would start painting again when he was recovering from a breakdown.
A final example of van Gogh’s still life is the magnificent vase of Irises that he painted in May 1890. This makes an interesting comparison with his picture of irises growing in a garden bed, which was briefly owned by Alan Bond — thanks to Sothebys’ finance — and set a record price for a single painting (1987). The comparison between the two pictures reminds us that flowers do not become still life until they are cut and moved from the natural into the human world.
Still life also became an important means of expression for an artist whom we have mentioned both in relation to figure painting — which he evidently found painfully difficult — and landscape, in which he excelled. Paul Cezanne painted the most remarkable still-life compositions of the later 19th century, quite different from Chardin in sensibility, but similar in intensity of vision: it is hard to walk past a still life by either artist in a museum without stopping to ponder the meaning hidden behind a collection of unassuming objects.
On the face of it, Cezanne’s work could hardly be more different in sensibility from van Gogh’s; the contrast is most obvious in their landscapes, but equally clear in their still-life compositions. One is emotional, passionate, exalted; the other is analytical and searching. Even in the motifs they paint, van Gogh chooses flowers which evoke the kind of pantheistic energy he finds in his late landscapes, while Cezanne sets up complex arrangements of fruit, bowls and jugs like experiments in a laboratory.
There is a certain oddness in these paintings of Cezanne’s, which is the key to his distinctive and original vision. If we look closely at Still life with Commode (1887-88), we may notice that there is an inconsistency in the way the various vessels are seen. Round shapes appear as ellipses in perspective, and all such forms seen from the same point of view should be consistent; yet here the mouth of the vase is rounder, that of the ginger jar flatter. Curiously, this reminds us of the wonderfully painted still-life details in the foreground of Velazquez’s Old Woman Frying Eggs (c. 1618), which was in Sydney in 2015-16 as part of an exhibition of works from the Scottish National Galleries.
The almost miraculous naturalism with which the young prodigy painted these objects makes it all the more surprising that the ellipses of the brass mortar and the earthenware jug are inconsistent. What this reflects, however, is the fact that Velazquez grew up in a Spanish provincial tradition that had learned something from the Netherlandish love of naturalism, but had not been deeply influenced by the mainstream modern concepts of perspective.
Thus Velazquez is looking at each object with an acuteness comparable to that of Chardin, but he is looking at each object as it were separately, and it does not occur to him that they should all be subordinated to a single point of view. Cezanne is doing something similar: he too seems to be approaching each element in his composition as a single act of looking, with little concern to co-ordinate all of these acts into a single logical model.
This is part of what makes his pictures so intriguing, and what makes his apples and pears and even folds of tablecloth so vivid: each one seems to bear the marks of the full and individual attention he has given it. They have not had to sacrifice part of their character to fit into the whole. Of course there has to be a whole, or there would not be a painting; but it is made by balancing these individual forms, as in his landscapes, within the matrix of the picture plane.
Perspective was never simply a tool for naturalistic painting; as Erwin Panofsky pointed out in Perspective as symbolic form (1927), it was above all an assertion of rationalism; that rationalism, indeed, was part of the nascent scientific vision of the world, and once again art was ahead of conceptual thinking in giving shape to emerging intuitions about human experience.
But what we see now, most conspicuously with Cezanne but arguably also in the work of other contemporaries, is an equally intuitive turning away from perspective, all the more surprising because it coincides with the triumph of science and the beginning of the transformation of the whole world by the applied science and technology of the Industrial Revolution. That is what we shall consider more closely next week when we look at the cubist movement.
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