Thursday, April 28, 2016

Dutch Still Life in the Age of Instagram

How old was I when I first realized a still life wasn't necessarily just a still life?

I had of course, seen still life paintings for my whole life. They were the necessary accoutrements to tasteful, middle-class living for decades if not centuries, only to be relatively recently usurped by abstract expressionism. The bourgeoisie gathered paintings of flowers and fruit, whether painted by friends and family, or whether acquired at small galleries or in tourist towns, and placed them on mantles and landings, art as innocuous as the wallpaper.

And yet if we go to the arts of the Netherlands in the 16th and 17th Centuries, we find that each angle was rich with religious meaning. Slaughtered birds, books, crystal goblets, mussel shells, and daffodils were imbued with meaning. A skull sits in the middle of a sumptuous chamber, to emphasize the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, while on oyster is a not-so-subtle reminder of lust. And at a time when Europe was being shredded by religious war, the still life became a Dutch specialty, a sort of aesthetic battle flag in the Thirty Years' War. 

Conversely, while the paintings of finished plates of food might on one level be a warning against immoderation, they are also the emblems of the Dutch Republic and its emphasis on trade. Those very same Calvinists who advocated a simple religion had no problem with the mass accumulation of capital. Without the religious agendas that marked, for instance, Spanish imperial expansion around the same time, the impetus of the Dutch colonial project was, above all else, the establishment of a network trading in what were then exotic commodities-- coffee, cloves, nutmeg, chocolate, and tobacco. And so the still life became representations of the ostentation and pomp of the new mercantile classes, the people who could afford elaborate breakfasts with lobsters and mountains of fruit.


Despite the fact that a great deal of this coded language and ironic double-meaning is lost on the modern viewer, the pleasing form of the still life remains-- probably something along the lines of what those merchant patrons were looking for. And its aesthetic DNA continues to the present day.

In a recent book of essays, Lawrence Weschler examined the portrait of Che Guevara's corpse, and found that it possessed the same composition as Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp.


Likewise, we live in a time when everyone is taking pictures of their lunch spreads, albeit showing them off on social media feeds rather than in sitting rooms. At brunch, we have inevitably become like those burghers of Haarlem and Leiden in an age of speculation and expansion, attempting to immortalize our luxuries.