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Category: vanitas

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The meaning of (some) art

Still life occupies the lowest rung among genres, but it’s also invested with deep meaning—whether or not the artist intends it.

Roses dans un vase de verre, 1883, Édouard Manet, private collection

If archeologists are correct, the objects painted on walls in Egyptian tombs are grave goods meant to go with the deceased into the afterlife. Their meaning is clear. You take into the afterlife what you valued and needed in life.

Still-Life Found in the Tomb of Menna, c. 14thcentury BC, courtesy The Yorck Project 

In western art, there has always been a spoken or unspoken hierarchy of genres, with still life occupying the lowest niche. In Greco-Roman villas, ‘vulgar’ subjects like fruits and vegetables adorned walls and floors. By the Middle Ages, still life was beginning to appear as side notes in more serious paintings. The Northern Renaissance painters treated still life as its own form, with fantastical flower paintings. These pieces seem like overblown bouquets to us, but they in fact depicted flora from different countries at peak bloom. They reflected the dawning European interest in science.

Flowers in a Wooden Vessel, 1606-1607, Jan Brueghel the Elder, courtesy Kunsthistorisches Museum

The Dutch Golden Age painters did much to improve the reputation of still life painting. Still life’s job was to reinforce social values. Vanitas painting expounds the futility of worldly pleasures. There is much overlap in symbols with memento mori, which reminds the viewer of the inevitability of death.

Vanitas with a skull, c. 1671, Philippe de Champaigne, courtesy MusĂ©e de TessĂ© 

Common symbols included skulls, time pieces and flowers, as in Philippe de Champaigne’s stark Vanitas, above. Rotten fruit and insects meant decay. Musical instruments told us that life is ephemeral. Fruit, flowers and butterflies spoke to the same truth. My favorite symbol is the lemon, which, like life, is beautiful to look at but bitter to the taste. (Oddly, coffee—which was brought in large scale to Europe by the Dutch East India Company—played no part in still life iconography, despite its addictive qualities.)

Take Your Choice, 1885, John F. Peto, courtesy National Gallery of Art

Trompe-l’Ɠil (‘deceive the eye’) has been with us as long as artists have painted, but a specific subset of it—objects on a wall or within a frame—were painted for narrative effect. Books, letters, guns, tools, dead game, playing cards and other art ‘tacked’ up on a wall were popular themes through the 19th century.

Les Anemones, c. 1900-1910 Odilon Redon, courtesy Minneapolis Institute of Art 

In the twentieth century, meaning took a radical turn. It stopped being about symbols and became about the artist’s own psyche. Odilon Redon, for example, wrote that he wanted to place “the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible.” Pablo Picasso famously said, “I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.” Everything Picasso painted was autobiographical.

Still life, 1938, Lee Krasner, courtesy National Gallery of Australia

From there it was a short jump to the position of the later 20th century, when meaning was banished from art entirely. It became about form and color, rather than anything the artist wanted to say.

Despite this, the artist’s own viewpoint inevitably creeps in. Édouard Manet was unfortunately afflicted with syphilis, which was in his time incurable. In his mid-forties, he developed what he thought were circulatory problems, but which was really the locomotor ataxia of end-stage syphilis. Confined to his bed, he could only paint the smallest still lives, but these are exquisite. The one at the top of this page is believed to be his last painting. Nominally a simple vase of roses, it is redolent with the grief and questioning of the end of life.

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Culture of Excess

Butcher’s Stall with the Flight into Egypt, 1551,Pieter Aertsen
My friend Dan Gowing was writing his Sunday school lesson this week when he realized just how efficient Jesus was with the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. The Gospel of Mark records that there were twelve baskets left after feeding 5,000 men and their families. Dan’s conclusion is that you can’t actually get anything you want from Jesus’ restaurant but you just might find you get what you need.
My holiday motto generally is, “What’s worth doing is worth doing to excess.” In that I am a typical American. Our Thanksgiving dinner alone usually has about twelve baskets of leftovers.
Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s Rudolf II as Vertumnus, 1590, takes “you are what you eat” to its ultimate level. It’s not mere whimsy, but symbolizes “the majesty of the ruler, the copiousness of creation and the power of the ruling family over everything.” (Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann) He’s not Dutch, but he sure is good.

In November, I postedabout Norman Rockwell’s iconic Freedom from Want and how its table is almost bare by modern standards. When Rockwell painted this a mere 70 years ago our self-identity was still Puritan. Today we wallow in outsized appetites, and we’re all pretty fat. In fact, we’re far more like the Dutch Golden Age than our own recent ancestors. Of course, back then the Dutch were rich like us.
On the other hand, most of us miss the point of those Dutch paintings entirely. If we see them just as a celebration of bounty or a cock’s crow of vanity, we’re missing the warning sign buried in them.
Shop, with the Flight into Egypt, top, is in fact an allegory. The Holy Family, inset in a window frame, distributes alms to the poor as they leave. A merry group is seen eating shellfish (a symbol of lust) through the other window. The sign at the top tells you that the land is for sale, leading you to understand that all of this is available at a moral price.
Still life, 1644, Adriaen van Utrecht. This canvas includes almost all the elements common to great Dutch still lives. The presence of so much exotica points to the great wealth of the Dutch Republic. However, within this epic are buried memento mori:  the seashell represents human frailty; the spotted fruit, our own aging and decay; the music, the brevity of life. Like life, the peeled lemon is pretty to look at but bitter to taste.

Several cultural forces in the Dutch Republic led to their love of still life. The rise in interest in natural science in the 16th century supported a concurrent rise in realism in painting (trompe l’oeil being the highest expression of this). By the 17th century, the Dutch Republic dominated world trade and had a vast colonial empire. They operated the largest fleet of merchant ships in the world.
But while they were rich and famously religiously tolerant, they were also strictly Calvinist. Icons were forbidden in the Dutch Reformed Protestant Church. Painters were forced to deal with religious subjects through symbolism. Their vanitaspaintings point out the transience of our earthly pleasures.
Flowers in a Silver Vase, 1663, by Willem van Aelst, includes a pocketwatch (time), poppies (death), roses (Christian faith), tulips (folly), dragonfly (transience), and butterfly (resurrection).
This was particularly easy with flowers. A language of flower symbolism had developed through the Middle Ages. These were both positive (such as the rose and lily representing love in both its divine and human manifestation) and negative (the poppy representing death). 
The presence of symbols of impermanence, such as candles, hourglasses, a book with pages turning, or buzzing flies, reminded the viewer that sensory pleasures are ephemeral.
The modern equivalent, of course, is the food photograph. Its similarity is in the excess, but it lacks self-awareness.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!