Continuing its tradition of offering new ways to look at established genres and artists, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts just opened Impressionist Still Life, an exhibit that traces the development of still life as an art form in the 19th century. By presenting the works of artists ranging from Edouard Manet to Paul Cezanne, the exhibit shows how the onset of industrialization, urban growth and mercantilism transformed the genre of still life from typical salon ornament to an expressive individual art form.
Although most observers would call Cezanne’s still life paintings typical, Impressionist Still Life culminates with his works, as an epitome of the transformation that the genre underwent during the Impressionist movement. The exhibit begins with traditional works such as Frederic Bazille’s “Flowers,” which follows the nook-vase-flowers drill, so widely accepted as the paragon of still life. The exhibition builds up toward the 1860s, when several French masters breathed new life into the art of stale salons with their musty velvet drapes and tasseled pouffes by infusing meaning into a previously decorative art form.
Before the 19th century, the genre of still life existed mostly as a showcase of a house’s fashionableness. Paintings of fruit and flowers, dead fowl and game dominated the walls of mansions, palaces and small homes of those who aspired to conform to the contemporary norms of artistic fashion. Jean-Baptiste Simeon Chardin was one of the first artists whose work re-asserted the creative value of still life, and soon after such famous impressionists as Claude Monet, Gustave Caillebotte, Edgar Degas and Paul Gaugin followed. By the early 1900s still life began to reflect vestiges of human life; shoes, fans and hats took over the pictures formerly preoccupied with flowers, fruit, fowl and skulls.
Impressionists introduced to the genre of still life modern materialistic reality through such novel settings as the marketplace and objects like shoes and paper. Manet, Degas and Cezanne intensified what Fantin-Latour and Caillebotte started in an attempt to break away from convention. Manet’s strikingly solid colors and precariously balanced objects undid the idea that still life should reaffirm solidity and grace without being overly obtrusive or grabbing too much attention — the idea which seems to govern traditional still life, like Bazille’s “Flowers.”
Several exhibited paintings mark breakthroughs in the process of abandoning the Victorian daintiness of still life for a more modern bluntness. For example, Claude Monet’s 1866 painting “The Jar of Peaches” looks shockingly urban – the cylindrical jar stands as erect as a skyscraper on a table streaked with puddles of water that look more like careless splotches of white paint or graffiti. The peaches – the beautiful pastoral fruit, characteristic of traditional still life – are violently crammed into the jar, as if the artist was trying to demonstrate on purpose how far he is willing to take still life before he’s done with it.
As the exhibition progresses, background and detail in the paintings slowly disintegrate. Painfully specific wallpaper designs give way to shadows, layered upon the canvas with broad strokes. Manet’s minimalist palette in his 1864 work “White Peonies with Pruning Shears” showcases white flowers on a black backdrop with a pair of ugly metallic shears glinting faintly in a corner. Like morbid claws, the shears seem to inch in on the delicate peonies, whose petals merge into the large white blotches that contrast so sharply with the murky background.
Overall, the settings in the still life paintings exhibited at the MFA tend toward naturalness. Renoir’s work introduces clay flower pots standing on the ground as a counterpart to traditional china vases set on doilies and tables. Monet inserts an occasional dead flower, while Bazille introduces paper into still life. In one of his works, a bouquet of wildflowers, wrapped in sterile, white paper, offers a very sobering reminder of modern artistic tendencies clashing with the inherently refined genre of still life.
Another revolutionary work, Fantin-Latour’s 1869 “The Betrothal Still Life,” looks deceptively traditional. Although all the ingredients of a conventional still life are there, they remain unmixed. The objects – the vase of strawberries with a loose berry, branch of cherries, vase of flowers, loose peony, and glass of wine – do not touch each other, and stand on their own like in a prison line-up. The artist purposely kills any trace of spontaneity. In another work of the same year, “White Cup and Saucer,” Fantin-Latour depicts an empty white cup on a flat brown background. The cup’s sterility practically calls the observer to wake up and smell the coffee now that the roses have wilted.
The exhibition ends with the works of Cezanne, one of the last representatives of Impressionism, and one of the first rungs on the ladder of Expressionism. His works stand out for their geometrical patterns and deliberate crudeness. “Nature should be handled with the cylinder, sphere, and cone,” he wrote. Cezanne’s early paintings, with their incongruous proportions and jumbled-up perspective, build up toward his later works, in which the artist begins to look for essential forms in a genre mostly preoccupied with frills, petals, tassels, and an occasional dead bird or skull. Cezanne’s 1900-1904 painting “Skull” has virtually no background, and consists of a brownish circle containing two smaller black-fringed circles and a triangle, which only from a distance add up to a skull; the ascetic refrain from detail makes Cezanne’s painting chillingly morbid in its straightforwardness.
Instead of complementing the wallpaper, nineteenth century impressionist still life asserts itself as more than a decoration, and as a genre equal in significance to the landscape and portrait. The exhibition at the MFA offers a step-by-step tour through the gradual changes that Impressionist artists introduced to the still life, paving the way for such groundbreaking twentieth-century artists as Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, and Chaim Soutine.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
