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.
