analysis

ARTS 1A

Topic 5: Still Life

First, watch the following short video, “Cézanne’s Still Lifes at His Studio: Aix-en-Provence, France”:

https://youtu.be/B2m1FKbbkjY

Pair 1: Cézanne and Chardin

Paul Cézanne

I. Still life is a subject category in which the representation inanimate objects is the most important aspect of the work of art. Students who attended art school in France in the nineteenth century spent a good deal of time painting objects, ultimately to demonstrate to their teachers that they could convey a sense of three-dimensionality on a flat surface. Most students attempted to create the illusion of three-dimensionality through careful consideration of light value while depicting shadows and highlights. By contrast, Paul Cézanne chose to model objects with color in addition to light value.

Paul Cézanne

Still Life with Apples and Pears

c. 1891-92

Oil on canvas

II. One of the reasons Cézanne’s still life paintings are considered visually powerful is because he chose to use colors that were mixed with very little black or white paint. Color intensity refers to the degree of purity of a color. Cézanne’s Still Life with Apples and Pears is an example of a painting in which the color intensity is strong. The shadows cast by objects are not produced with greys but with violets, blues, and greens. The brightest highlights on the objects are not produced with white but with different versions of yellow.

Jean-Baptise-Siméon Chardin

I. More than a century and a half before Cézanne produced Still Life with Apples and Pears, another academically-trained French painter, Chardin, produced a still life painting, Attributes of the Painter, which represents materials and tools used by oil painters. Oil paint is a painting medium in which pigment is mixed with linseed oil. Oil paint is known for its tendency to dry slowly; for its translucent quality; for the wide variety of colors that may be produced with it; and for its ability to be used in varying qualities of thickness or thinness.

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin

Attributes of the Painter

1725-1727

Oil on canvas

II. A look at one of the objects in this still life—the painter’s palette—reveals three colors placed next to each other which are considered primary colors: those colors (red, yellow, and blue) from which all other colors may be made. While Chardin’s still life is produced largely by means of earth colors like brown and red, the light blue color of the rolled-up paper to the right of the palette indicates that the artist attempted to balance this composition by offsetting the warm reds at the left with a cool blue at the right.

Analysis Exercises: Pair 1

Exercise 1: Who was likely to purchase a still life painting from Cézanne? Or from Chardin? Provide a rationale for your response, based on the works of art themselves.

Exercise 2: Why do you think so many artists throughout history have used fruit as a still life subject?

Exercise 3: Both Chardin and Cézanne were oil painters, a painting medium recognized in part for the wide variety of colors that may be produced with it. How did these artists approach color differently?

Pair 1

Pair 2: David Bailly and Rebecca Scott

David Bailly

I. David Bailly was a seventeenth-century Dutch artist who produced still life paintings which served to encourage people to consider their attitudes about money and ambition. Such works are called vanitas paintings. Vanitas is a theme within literature and art which warns about the emptiness of wealth and power. By the time Bailly produced Vanitas Still Life of 1651, The Netherlands had become the most wealthy county in Europe due to its participation in the global mercantile economy, based in large part on colonialist practices.

David Bailly

Vanitas Still Life

1651

Oil on wood

II. David Bailly included objects in this still life which ask viewers to consider their mortality. Such objects are called memento mori, which means “be mindful of your own mortality”. The candle has been snuffed out, the bubbles are about to burst, the flower is dying. But the most obvious memento mori is a skull. Dutch patrons of vanitas paintings were usually religious people who believed in an afterlife and felt that it was better to give one’s money to charity than get bogged down by it during one’s lifetime. On illusionistically painted “paper” in the lower right corner the artist has painted the words “VANITAS VANITUM ET OMNIA VANITAS,” which means ”Vanity, vanity. All is vanity,” a quote from the ancient Jewish king Solomon found in the Book of Ecclesiastes.

Rebecca Scott

I. Like David Bailly, British contemporary artist Rebecca Scott paints still life works to encourage viewers to consider or reconsider their values. Her oil painting, Oh, it’s a perfect day, is from a series she calls “Perfect Life.” She finds inspiration for this series in photographs of expensive luxury objects in commercial home furnishing catalogues. Fine bedding and fashionable tableware figure prominently in these works.

Viewers may feel tempted simply to enjoy the appearance of luxury objects in Scott’s paintings, just one’s eyes may find pleasure in the painted objects in David Bailly’s still life. But like Bailly, Scott’s intention is to call out viewers for their materialism, challenging them to ask, Does the acquisition of expensive tableware define a perfect life?

Rebecca Scott

Oh, it’s a perfect day From the “Perfect Life” series

2005

Oil on canvas

II. Rebecca Scott’s technical approach to oil painting is painterly, that is, it calls attention to large brushstrokes as evidence of the act of painting. David Bailly, on the other hand, concealed his brushwork, painting with tiny, fine strokes.

Moreover, the table top in Rebecca Scott’s Oh, it’s a perfect day reveals the artist’s wide command of color, including secondary colors, that is, colors which made by mixing two or more primary colors. Green, orange, and violet are examples of secondary colors.

Pair 2

Analysis Exercises: Pair 2

Exercise 1: Do you prefer to look at paintings in which the artist has taken a painterly approach, as in Rebecca Scott’s work discussed in this chapter, or do you prefer the approach of David Bailly, in which the brushwork is disguised?

Exercise 2: If you were to hang a still life painting in your home, would you want it to convey a message, or would you prefer to enjoy it on a “formal” level, that is, from the standpoint of the elements of art and principles of design?

Exercise 3: Explain how can there be continuity between the messages of David Bailly’s and Rebecca Scott’s work, given that they were produced more than three and a half centuries apart?

Pair 3: Julie Green and Carel Fabritius

Julie Green

I. One morning in 1999 artist Julie Green came across a description in a newspaper of the execution of an individual imprisoned in the state of Oklahoma. As she read the menu of the individual’s final meal, she found that she had a lot of questions. Green considered the importance and personal role of food in her life and in the life of her family, and she began to seek out accounts of the final meals of others who had died through capital punishment. She began a series, ”The Last Supper,” in which she would eventually paint the final meals of 1,000 people who have been executed in the United States.

Julie Green

Montana 16 February 1917. One apple.

2011

Cobalt blue glaze on found plate; kiln fired

(The artist at “Flown Blue,” a midcareer retrospective exhibition at the American Museum of Ceramic Art in Pomona, California.)

II. Believing that the subject of a work of art should match the medium, Green tried embroidering the last meals of executed people onto napkins. However, she found that technique to be prohibitively time consuming. She decided instead to paint the final meals on ceramic plates she had collected.

The art historical term for each plate used by Julie Green in this series is found object. A found object is not made by the artist but chosen by the artist to be included in a work of art. In Green’s painting shown on the previous slide, Montana 16 February 1917. One apple., the found object is a white plate with faint blue decoration on one side.

Green’s “The Last Supper” series has been widely exhibited. The American Museum of Ceramic Art in Pomona, California, organized a midcareer retrospective exhibition of her work in 2019. A retrospective is an exhibition which looks back at the scope of an artist’s career.

By the time Julie Green’s work was shown in Pomona, she had completed more than eight hundred plates in “The Last Supper” series. You can examine each plate in the series on the artist’s website, which she organized by the states in which the individuals were executed.

Carel Fabritius

I. The apple painted by Julie Green to memorialize an individual executed in Montana in 1917 is highly detailed, from the bright highlight to the shape of the stem. But because she chose to paint all the meals in a single hue— blue—the representation of the food takes on an otherworldly quality.

By contrast, seventeenth-century Dutch artist Carel Fabritius desired to depict objects so realistically as to fool the eye. For The Goldfinch, Fabritius chose subtle browns and creams as well as varying shades of grey for the purpose of drawing as close to the colors of nature as possible. We refer to Fabritius’s attempt to fool us into believing that this is not a painting but an actual goldfinch as trompe l’oeil, a French term which may be translated as “deceives the eye.”

Carel Fabritius

The Goldfinch

1654

Oil on wood

(detail)

II. In Fabritius’s The Goldfinch it is not through detail but through color that the artist attempted to fool the eye. He painted this subject on an unusually thick wooden support which may have served as part of the construction of a window in his studio. His deep understanding of the ways natural light affects the surface of different objects enhanced Fabritius’s ability to create a lifelike representation of the bird.

The goldfinch is chained to a perch. Is this a representation of someone’s pet? If so, is it portrait? Or should the daily life of a songbird be categorized as a genre scene? Because the artist paints the bird as an inanimate object many scholars believe it is best discussed as as a still life. Perhaps we should determine that this is a hybrid subject: a work of art which may be categorized as more than one subject type.

Pair 3

Analysis Exercises: Pair 3

Exercise 1: Capital punishment, captivity . . . the themes addressed by these works carry immense emotional weight. What choices have the artists made—in purely visual terms— to enable viewers to spend time contemplating these difficult themes?

Exercise 2: In both cases these works have a relatively “flat” background with little to distract the eye beyond the primary subject. Why are the backgrounds chosen by the artists suitable for these subjects?

Exercise 3: Julie Green created a sense of volume in her representation of an apple through bright white highlights on the apple itself. How did Carel Fabritius create a sense sense of volume in his representation of the goldfinch?

Pair 4: Gehry, Oldenburg, and Van Bruggen and Nils-Udo

Frank Gehry, Claes Oldenburg, and Coosje van Bruggen

I. An artistic collaboration signifies a temporary or long- term partnership between two or more creative people who share vision and labor to produce a work of art or architecture. A successful collaboration is one in which we cannot imagine the finished work without the contributions of each participant.

The Chiat/Day Building in Venice, California, is an example of a successful collaboration between architect Frank Gehry and the sculpture team Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen.

(detail)

Frank Gehry (architect) Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen (sculptors)

Chiat/Day Building (Binoculars Building) Venice, California

1991

Steel, concrete, and painted cement plaster

II. This project, commissioned by the Chiat/Day advertising agency, enabled experimental architect Frank Gehry to design a building which evoked the history of still life representation. Giant Binoculars, a work of sculpture designed by the artistic team Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, serves as the building’s doorway.

Long committed to producing monumental sculpture of mundane objects, Oldenburg had been active in the Pop Art movement of the late 1950s, during which artists prioritized the representation of objects associated with ordinary life. Produced more than thirty years after the height of Pop Art in the United States, the design of the Chiat/Day Building acknowledges not only the creative projects of the advertisers who worked inside it, but the history of art itself.

Nils-Udo

I. German artist Nils-Udo is committed to making art that is transitory, that is, temporary and likely to disappear over time. For this reason he chooses elements of nature such as plants and sticks to construct works of sculpture. He expects La Couvée (The Brood), which is sculpted in marble, to wear away over time.

Nils-Udo

La Couvée (The Brood) Fondation Carmignac, Hyères, France

2018

Carrara marble, earth, forest

II. In the 1960s, while Pop artists like Claes Oldenburg were redefining the relationship between art and consumer culture in urban environments, Nils-Udo turned to the rural environment and began using plants as his primary medium. He wrote, “Potential Utopias are under every stone, on every leaf, and behind every tree, in the clouds and in the wind. . . .” A utopia is a place where everything is ideal, or perfect.

Nils-Udo’s use of the term “utopia” may offer an important key to understanding his motivation to produce a work such as La Couvée (The Brood). It suggests that perfection is not something artists make but which artists can discover if they make art in conjunction with nature. By association, viewers too can discover perfection if they search for it in the natural environment in which the work is situated.

Pair 4

Analysis Exercises: Pair 4

Exercise 1: If the Chiat/Day Building by Frank Gehry, Claes Oldenburg, and Coosje van Bruggen offers a look back at the history of art, in what ways does Nils-Udo’s La Couvée (The Brood) offer a look forward?

Exercise 2: The Chiat/Day Building and La Couvée (The Brood) both incorporate monumental sculpture. Why do you think that some artists choose to work in an oversized scale?

Exercise 3: Do you think that each of these works are well suited to their environments? Why or why not?