Objects of Beauty
Still life, that most humble
of the classical genres, traces its origins to a legendary painting contest.
Around 400 B.C., the Greek painter Zeuxis was said to have painted grapes so
lifelike that birds came to peck at them. His rival, Parrhasios, secretly
painted a curtain over the panel of grapes. Zeuxis tried to lift the curtain,
and lost the contest. Teasingly realistic grapes and drapes have figured in
still lifes ever since. Some of the most spectacular examples of the genre,
which got its name in 17 th -century Holland, depict great mounds of
fruit and fabric that fool the eye ( trompe l'oeil ) so completely that we
can practically smell them and feel them.
Still
life--the portrayal of familiar inanimate objects--is, as the name suggests, a
paradoxical genre. Its French name, nature morte ("dead nature"), points
up the paradox even more acutely. If the Dutch "banquet pieces" suggest endless
beauty--Holland in the 17 th century was so rich it didn't know what
to do with its money--there's a darker side to still life that warns of the
brevity of earthly pleasures. The ancient Egyptians painted images of food and
personal effects in their tombs, images that were to accompany the dead on
their last journey, and a rich tradition of European still-life painting slips
little reminders of mortality--skulls and flickering candles--among the apples
and pears and peeled lemons.
Still life, then, is caught between the timeless vision and
the ticking clock. When you enter the current show at the Museum of Modern Art,
titled "Objects of Desire: The Modern Still Life," you find yourself in a small
white room with only one painting on the wall, Cézanne's Still Life With a
Ginger Jar and Eggplants (1890-94). This is the timeless vision. The effect
is that of a hushed chapel, and on the altar is this gorgeous riddle of a
painting, with its tilted plate of ripe pears, its pendulous eggplants, its
great blue-black bedspread draped across the lower half of the painting, and
its round, wicker-wound ginger jar, carefully placed in the middle. Every form
finds an echo elsewhere in the painting, and none of the depicted objects calls
attention to the historical moment.
It's a
dazzling opening, this great Cézanne, and much of the explosion of Cubist work
in the next room builds on Cézanne's achievement. The gravity-defying sepia
swirls of Picasso and Braque, with their fragments of guitars and violins--a
fiddlehead here, an S-curve there, a couple of quarter notes waltzing off a
table edge somewhere else--have a kindred formal harmony.
Then you turn a corner and enter a different world, where
the immediacy of modern life, of the ticking clock, is everywhere palpable.
Here in a glass case is Man Ray's Gift (1921):
a clothes iron painted black with a row of 13 tacks glued headfirst into the
face. Next to it is Marcel Duchamp's bizarre Why Not Sneeze Rose Sélavy?
(1921): a metal bird cage, painted white, containing 151 marble cubes, a
thermometer, and a piece of cuttlebone--the internal shell of a squid-like
creature, used, according to the dictionary, as "a dietary supplement for caged
birds." Such objects, with their elliptical wit, return us to the dark side of
still life; these bones and cages and tacks and thermometers offer a deadpan
answer to what life is: C'est la vie.
These "ready-mades," as
Duchamp called them, pose in a new way the oldest still-life question: Is it
real or is it art? Instead of birds pecking at painted grapes, we have objects
that are real and art. Andy Warhol's carefully constructed and painted
Brillo
Boxes (1964) stacked on the floor look an awful lot like
Brillo boxes stacked on the floor. Backtracking, I found myself wondering what
these things had to do with Cézanne, and the answer is: not much.
For,
alongside Cézanne's timeless forms in subtle harmony, another modern still-life
tradition has flourished, more in tune with pop culture, advertising, and the
disposable culture of the 20 th century. MoMA, which does so well by
the scions of Cézanne, is less instructive about this hybrid line of
descent.
There was space in that little white chapel at the start of
the show to include an example of the trompe l'oeil American masters
William
Harnett and John Peto, contemporaries of Cézanne's, who are just as much
founders of modern still life as Cézanne, and whose more playful spirit is just
as tangible in the works at MoMA. After all, the title of the show perfectly
fits the objects Harnett and Peto assembled: dollar bills, snapshots of loved
ones, jewel-studded pistols.
As one
ventures deeper into the 20 th century, from Dadaism to Surrealism to
Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, it is Harnett one thinks of more often than
Cézanne. Harnett's practice of inserting newspaper headlines among his
tacked-up objects turns up in Braque and Juan Gris, their way of asserting both
the up-to-dateness of their art and the background noise of World War I.
One aim of "Objects of Desire" is to show how the same
objects in the limited repertory of still life--wine bottles and fruits, pipes
and shaving kits--take on very different meanings, public and private, over
time. The show succeeds spectacularly in this regard. Gerald Murphy's
Razor (1924) is alert to consumerist art during the 1920s, the so-called
"golden age of advertising." The razor crossed with the fountain pen,
surmounted by a box of matches, reminds those in the know that Murphy, the
model for the hero of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night , gave up
painting to run the family business, Mark Cross pens. When a trompe
l'oeil shaving brush and a match turn up later in the show in Magritte's
Personal Values (1952), they have an oneiric suggestiveness
quite in contrast to Murphy's flat factuality. Superimposed against a blue sky,
Magritte's comb seems to be lying on clouds of shaving cream--a painter's
dream--while the match lies asleep on the floor. Still-life objects that have
figured for centuries as reminders of mortality can take on new urgency under
the pressure of history. In Max Beckmann's Still Life With Three Skulls
(1945), the greenish skulls on the table look fresh--as indeed they were in
that harrowing year--like not-quite-ripe fruit. Warhol's Skull (1976)
now reads unavoidably as a premonition of AIDS.
Passing
through the final rooms of the show, one feels the pressure of an argument
beginning to emerge. Painting gives way increasingly to 3-D sculpted still
lifes, such as Jasper Johns' brace of cast bronze Ballantine Ale cans (Painted Bronze, 1960), and found objects. Those dueling Greek
painters return in a new guise, as Mario Merz, in the Zeuxis role, covers a
glass table with an array of fresh vegetables and fruit, changed daily by a New
York caterer ( Spiral Table , 1982), while Christo, playing Parrhasios,
conceals the familiar Cézannesque shapes--wine bottle, vase, etc.--under a
drapery of canvas ( Package on a Table , 1961).
We're meant to feel that we're coming to the end of the
line, an impression confirmed in Domenico Gnoli's painting of an empty table
covered with a lace tablecloth, Without a Still Life (1966), placed
toward the end of the show and chosen for the cover of the catalog. The
still-life objects have escaped, leaving the bare table, the bare canvas.
MoMA's story of modern art,
beginning with Cézanne and ending with abstraction, has been confirmed, but at
a cost. The final rooms feel like classrooms, with lessons hammered home. The
show ends as it began, in a small white room holding one object. This time the
altarpiece is a plain white block of marble centered on the floor, Wolfgang
Laib's Milkstone (1988). A wall panel explains that a film of milk
covers the top of the marble, so that a "living substance" (milk) has been
"stilled," thus "embodying the quintessential definition of the still life."
Such heavy-handed conceptual humor is a far cry from Duchamp's mercurial wit,
or from the visceral delight of Meret Oppenheim's Object (1936), the
famous fur-lined teacup. Now that's a living object stilled.
