Yonder: Essays

Ghosts at the Table

Traditional still life is easy to recognize. It is the painting of things. The objects are usually small and most often set out on a table. The things are not outdoors but inside a house, and the represented space is not deep but shallow, which makes the spectator feel close to them. Still life does not include people. It implies human presence but doesn’t show the living human form. Painting the inanimate world is different from painting people or nature, for the simple reason that paintings, like things, are still. Landscapes may depict storms at sea or a gentle breeze blowing across a meadow, but the paint is motionless. Portraits may imply the movement of a hand, the beginning of a smile, but the human beings on the canvas are stopped in that instant forever. Like all mimetic painting, traditional still life is in the business of illusion. Only a mad person would reach out to take a grape from a Chardin canvas in order to eat it, and yet the fact is that the painting of a table laid for dinner, flat as it is, bears a resemblance to the reality of the things it refers to by virtue of its deadness. The French nature morte bears this aspect of still life in its name. The genre as a whole exists within the human relation to things — essentially a relation between what is living and what is dead.

The idea of things and only things as a suitable subject for painting dates back to antiquity; since then, the genre has labored under the weight of its insignificance. Painting a pear or a dish was never as important as painting a person. The still life has always been lowest on the rung of art’s hierarchy. The depicted subject was crucial in determining the significance of the work of art. Nevertheless, things have always played a role in art, and the problem at hand is to sort out the differences. A Byzantine icon may contain an object, but the depicted thing was not meant to look real. It was filled with the magic of otherness — the rendering of the sacred was itself sacred. And even with the growing humanism of the Renaissance, things in paintings carried symbolic and mythical value. It is the Dutch who are credited with the rise of still life, who moved the detail of a canvas to its center and made it a full-fledged genre; but even then, no matter how mimetic the images, ethical and religious ideas inhabited the objects seen in the painting. The very marginality of still life would make it attractive to modern artists and give it a subversive edge. They could play with the old hierarchies but refuse to give in to them.

And yet the rise of the humble object as a suitable subject for painting cannot be separated from the sense that the ordinary might hold a viewer’s interest — that a simple thing could be charged with power. It is true that without the striving, growing merchant class and its accumulation of material wealth in seventeeth-century Holland, the sparkling glasses, dishes, pipes, fruits, meats, and animal carcasses could not have been elevated to the status of a painting’s sole subject. The still life embodied a new emphasis on the significance of the everyday. And this vision of the pedestrian as something interesting, as something worthy of interest, has never left the genre.

When I was in Chicago last summer, I went to the Art Institute, and among the paintings I saw was Chardin’s last work. It is the picture of a table with a simple white cloth. On the table is a sausage, bread, a glass, a knife. It is an image so simple, so without drama, that it is difficult to describe its effect. When I looked at the painting, I was overwhelmed by its pathos. My eyes filled with tears, as if I were looking at a scene of a dying child and not at a table with sausage on it. I cannot fully explain this emotion, but reading Diderot, I discovered that he felt something similar about Chardin: “This magic,” he writes, “is beyond comprehension.” Norman Bryson, in his fine book Looking at the Overlooked (Harvard University Press, 1990), notes that Chardin avoided arrangements that looked arranged and that the blurring of paint near his frames allows the spectator an illusory entrance into the room. Chardin creates an intimate, familiar domestic space that has a strong relation to human gestures. But more than this, his painting evokes for me what is not there. The man or woman who ate of them is no longer at the table; but the food, the utensil, the glass are still charged by that unseen human presence. And because the missing person cannot be reduced to a particular sex, to a unique face and body, the spectator who peers into the space and the one who has left it share the table more completely. The fact is I do not imagine the absent people as painted images but as living beings.

In Jerusalem, I had a similar experience, at the Israel Museum, with real things. Found with the Dead Sea Scrolls were a few objects: among them, a basket and a plate. The basket, mostly intact, was identical to one you could buy today in any market in the Mediterranean. The plate was of pale green glass with a simple geometric design around its edge. It could have been made yesterday. Two thousand years stood between me and those objects, and yet in their familiarity and constancy, time vanished. A nameless woman used the plate the way I use my plates. She carried food in her basket the way I carry groceries in mine. Were I to come face-to-face with her by some enchantment, the cultural distances between us would be vast, but through these objects we are linked. It is Chardin’s simplest still lifes — the late ones — like Glass of Water with Coffeepot that stir me most deeply. Like the basket and plate behind glass in the museum, Chardin’s paintings make me feel reverence for what it means to be human. We breathe. We eat. Then one day we die.

Our eyes continually roam over the world of things, and we notice things more when we are alone. A human face will always draw our attention away from objects; but in solitude, objects are the company we keep. Chardin’s canvas is as silent and the things he represents in it are as motionless as they are in life. But the canvas itself is also a thing, an object that, like many objects, outlasts human beings, and its survival is written into the idea of the painting itself. Real bread goes stale, real sausage decays. The table, the glass, the utensils, however, might remain intact for generations. But we are not looking at bread or sausage or wood or metal, but paint, as Magritte’s famous pipe joke would later openly announce. We are peeking into a framed space of illusion, but it is an illusion Chardin makes convincingly. Chardin’s still lifes are not allegorical, as were the Dutch and Flemish painters’. Their grand theme of Vanitas becomes in Chardin the simple truth of mortality. We are all ghosts at Chardin’s table.

A hundred years before Chardin, Juan Sanchez Cotan painted still lifes that inhabit a radically different universe. His luminous fruits and vegetables have an uncanny clarity that jolts the spectator. It is not a problem of recognition. I recognize each food in Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber, and yet these fruits and vegetables do not remind me of those in my own kitchen, as Chardin’s do. It is as if these foods have been overexposed. The melon reveals a surgical slash made by a knife’s incision. The suspended cabbage and quince, the resting melon and cucumber are immaculate, discrete entities. The painting’s effect relies on the clean separation of one thing from another. In this work, no food touches the other. As Bryson points out, Cotan’s still lifes are rooted in the monastic life he lived as a lay brother of the Carthusian order, an order that emphasized solitude. Bryson links Cotan’s painting to the imaginative use of the senses in Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. In Cotan’s work, vision is heightened and sharpened.

When I look at this food, I am awed, and I would guess this is exactly the feeling I am supposed to have. In the world, food becomes part of the body. It enters us, is used, and the excess is expelled as waste. Digestion blurs the line between the eater and the eaten. In Chardin, there is a comfortable relation between the absent bodies and the food that is meant to enter them. In Cotan, we know we are looking at food, and we know that food is to be eaten. In this painting, part of the melon has been consumed, but eating is part of a larger order of things, an order that relies on clear separations — among them, a clean cut between the body and the outside world. The fasting and sexual abstinence practiced by the Carthusians as acts of purification and denial are attempts to seal off the body from the outside. This is not an impulse limited to religious orders. Modern anorexics are driven by a similar desire. Bryson evokes the Spiritual Exercises to illuminate the role of vision in approaching the sacred, but the Exercises also present us with a formal schedule of classification and discipline, by which means daily life may be perfectly ordered. In his book Sade, Fourier, Loyola (Hill and Wang, 1978), Roland Barthes notes that the Exercises propose a way to completely cover the day, so that no moment is free. This absolute coverage takes pictorial form in these precisely rendered and neatly distinguished fruits and vegetables. (I can’t help thinking of the seven-year-old who has a horror of his peas sliding into his mashed potatoes.) Behind the food is a black, rectangular void. This dark space is not the space of perception. It is unreal, abstract, and it suggests not a solid wall but infinity. This is food as sacred gift shining inside, not a human order but one ordained by God. When I look at this painting, I do not feel the presence of the brother who ate that piece of melon. I do not even feel the painter. I am alone, staring into something both strange and incomprehensible. Like a monk, I am alone with God.

Chardin and Cotan may be said to occupy the psychological poles of still life. Chardin eases every separation, between the viewer and what is viewed but also among the objects he paints. There is no strain in looking at his food and objects. It is their very ordinariness that enchants them. Cotan is all strain, discipline, and withholding, qualities so rigorous that the ordinary becomes extraordinary.

Most of Dutch still life painting resides somewhere between these two poles. Willem Claesz’s painting Vanitas serves as a good example of a middle ground. In it we see smoking paraphernalia, a plate, knife, bowl of fruit, a strangely tilted glass vase, and a skull. It is a somber image. The silver bowl is opulent and beautiful but dimly illuminated; a subtle gleam of light appears on its base, a gleam echoed on the vase, which then reappears more dimly on the skull. Without the skull, the painting would be different, but it would remain sobering. The objects on the table are not in perfect order, but the scene isn’t slovenly either. It is true that the plate hangs slightly over the table’s edge, as does one of the pipes, but it isn’t in danger of falling. The object that does seem precarious is the vase, tipped dangerously to the right. The object’s angle seems to imply that it is about to shatter. As I look at it, the tension between the left and the right side of the canvas begins to seem dramatic. My eye is pulled from the upright form of the bowl over to the leaning vase and tipped skull. It is a movement from relative order to disorder, which is then restabilized by the vertical candleholder above the skull. This is not an image of chaos but one in which order and chaos, life and death coexist and define each other. Of course, Claesz’s skull carries the message of universal mortality far more pointedly than Chardin. The skull is the ultimate meeting ground of the spectator and the object, because we are projected into it. I will eventually become it. The skull, along with animal carcasses, is a recurring image in still life. These things qualify literally as still life, as nature morte, because, in death, living creatures become objects. The depiction of a human corpse would share this quality, but showing whole human bodies, living or dead, is not traditionally part of the genre. The skull, however, fits neatly on a table. It is important to note that a human thighbone could never have the power of a skull. The skull retains the outlines of the human face, and people are drawn to it. This attraction is very possibly a physiological one. Infants are drawn to faces almost immediately. The holes in a skull, in which there once were eyes, the empty cranium, which once was the seat of an individual consciousness, carry the clear traces of a living past.

The skull returns again and again in the form. Max Beckmann’s 1945 Still Life with Three Skulls uses the old image to new and terrifying effect. Claesz is reminding us of mortality. Beckmann’s table with skulls, a bottle, and playing cards reminds us of recent human slaughter. Soutine’s Carcass of Beef (1924) is similar in its intent. This canvas vividly shows us an animal’s bloody entrails and with it the suggestion that the animal has just been killed. The longer you look at it, the more you feel that its screaming ended only moments ago. In all of these still lifes, from Cotan to Chardin to Claesz to the modern examples of Beckmann and Soutine, the canvases are drenched with meaning. They cannot be reduced to “messages.” The great allegorical paintings of the Dutch are not one-liners. The relationship between an object and the way it figures in these allegories is neither simple nor direct. Chardin’s still lifes are heavy with emotion, but the production of that feeling cannot be reduced to the depiction of one object or another. Nevertheless, these works draw from and play with a known pictorial vocabulary through which they produce complex meanings.

Cézanne wanted something different. His still lifes are phenomenological. The spectator is alone and supreme, and the appetite that remains is one for looking, not eating. I am not tempted by Cézanne’s pears in Still Life with Ginger Jar and Eggplants, because they are not pears. They are forms in the space of my perception (just as the ginger jar next to them is). The pears are elevated, not out of their thingness but out of their ordinary role as food. And the light has changed. Chardin, like the Dutch and Flemish before him, worked within the darkness of thick walls and filtered light, but now the doors and windows have been thrown open and light shines onto these objects to illuminate them as prelinguistic entities. It may seem odd to speak of images in terms of language. Pictures are supposed to escape the confines of words. But language is the grid through which we see the world, and in still life, naming is implied in looking. The humility of the depicted things creates a more direct relation between the noun and its meaning, a relation that is less direct, for example, in a narrative history painting. The food and vessels of Chardin are all named and known. They live inside a universe of fully articulated domestic habit that comforts us with their familiarity. There is a clove of garlic sitting next to a coffeepot. It has rolled toward the edge of the table, probably during the preparation of a meal. In Cotan, the identification of each fruit and vegetable designated in the title is cast in an almost terrifying clarity that seems to enhance its identity as God given, as though the painter is striving toward a pre-Babel world. The wonder of Cézanne comes from refusing the categories of a given, common language. What Chardin celebrates, Cézanne rejects.

His still lifes feel both undomestic and unfeminine. The food and objects he paints have been drained of their household functions, their semantic content. His objects appear denatured by the act of looking itself. Most people have experienced the odd sensation of estrangement that comes from looking long enough at a single object. For all of us there was a time before we knew what things were called, and then the world looked different. Cézanne’s still lifes are a rigorous effort to return to a vision unburdened by meaning. In a letter to a young poet in 1896, in which he complains about his growing fame, he writes, “… were it not that I am passionately fond of the contours of my own country, I should not be here.”⁵ The word contours is revealing. He does not say landscape. He says contours. Cézanne was searching for contours that would make us see again, in paint, what we have lost to language. The flatness or distortion of his canvases, the things that sometimes appear to float on the canvas, serve this alienation. It is as if these objects cannot be fully assimilated into their names. A part of them flees the word and lives in its contours.

In some way the project Cézanne set for himself is impossible. Because we can identify the things he paints, they cannot be stripped of meaning, and yet within this idea of seeing the world anew is also the proposition that paint is the medium in which to do it. Cézanne does not hide the existence of the brush but lets the strokes show, and by flattening his perspective, he tacitly acknowledges the canvas as a canvas. But Cézanne is not joking or teasing his viewer with some notion of art for art’s sake. The project on view in Cézanne’s still lifes and the sensuality of these objects is serious. Cézanne said again and again that he was interested in looking at nature, and he had a passion for discovery that was never completely satisfied. After all, light and air never rest. Cézanne painted the same place and the same things over and over again, in a constant search for the real through the imaginary. These still lifes show us mutability, not because we know that pears in the world rot but because these pears appear to exist within a larger continuum of nature that is in constant flux.

Cézanne, as is universally acknowledged, left a deep imprint on modern still life. Matisse’s still lifes bear the lessons of Cézanne. He, too, democratizes the visual field — flattening foreground and background into one, encouraging the spectator to take in one thing as much as another. But Matisse’s things are not denatured. In Still Life with Blue Tablecloth, I say to myself, There is a beautiful blue tablecloth with a coffeepot, a bowl of apples, and a green bottle illuminated by sunlight shining into the house. The coffeepot retains its connection to domestic life without this fact being particularly important. When I look at these still lifes by Matisse, I remember that ordinary things at home are also beautiful — a white pitcher on my red table, yellow roses in a blue vase. But looking at Matisse is not like looking at things at home. It is more like a vivid, very recent memory — the imprint that remains after you have closed your eyes to the image in the light.

Cubism adopts Cézanne’s idea of a new look at things without his devotion to the idea of unearthing an idea of the real — whatever the cubists may have claimed. Cubist still life canvases are lively, intellectual exercises that dissect ordinary vision in the interest of perceptual play. Their strength is in bringing an almost musical rhythm to the genre, so that the classical Dutch convention of showing instruments in still life becomes an evocation of music’s real movement, not only the idea of music as one of the fleeting pleasures we may indulge in before we die. And yet no matter how surprising these canvases must have seemed at the time, they are unmysterious. They articulate objects as much as Chardin does, but without the larger sense that this articulation is a pact of human fellowship. In cubism, even if the image is blasted to bits, a guitar is a guitar is a guitar, as long as we can detect its strings. Recognition is investigated but not subverted, as it is in Cézanne. Forceful, fun, and overtly masculine, cubism quotes the still life genre for its own purposes.

Classical still life has continued to thrive in the twentieth century. Giorgio Morandi’s miraculous bottles fall within the tabletop genre and tantalize the viewer with a strange dynamic between belief and doubt. His bottles suggest at once their identity as bottles in the world and an existence as spectral as Platonic shadows. If you look long enough at his paintings, the forms seem to change in their light — not sunlight but light from some imaginary source. As in Cotan, we cannot approach these images without awe. They reside in a space of otherness that may still be construed as a table.

Picasso, Klee, and Magritte all worked squarely inside the genre at times, but unlike Morandi, they did not find a home there. Philip Guston is the most recent artist I can think of whose use of still life was not a conservative nod to an old genre but a revolutionary gesture. In his late works, Guston does not refer back to a classic form but reinvents it. His drawings in particular — of shoes, books, brushes, pencils, ladders, cans, bottles, cigarettes, trash can lids, and nails — are unlike earlier still life and utterly different from the blank images of pop art that preceded his late work. Guston said himself that he was overwhelmed by a desire to draw objects, that he felt “relief and a strong need to cope with tangible things.”⁶ Still life in Guston seems to happen as part of a larger project that also includes the human figure and that bears a powerful relation to the body. An untitled drawing with a hand and a cigarette smoked backward (1967) feels to me very much like still life, except that, in this case, what is implied in Chardin — the gestures of a body — is included, not excluded. The gesture is also inverted, creating a comic complication unallowable in Chardin. The presence of a hand in Chardin’s work would disrupt its stillness. Here the hand seems to be another object in the world of objects. And while the things Chardin paints remind us of a universal domesticity, Guston’s pictures are personal images of a particular inner life that begin to gain resonance for all of us.

His images repeat themselves in a mobile creation of new meanings. It is as if he is in the business of inventing a new syntax of the banal. The shoe, for example, turns up again and again. The drawing of an untied boot from 1967 is infused with a sense of comic sadness, while The Door (1976), in which we see a crowd of boot and shoe soles almost entirely blocking an open door, communicates alarm and sexual discomfort. But the shoe is a labile entity, a true poetic form. In the remarkable Painter’s Forms (1972), a man’s profile with an opened mouth appears to spew forth, among other things, a cork, a boot, a sole, and a bottle. An infant’s first experience of the world is through its mouth, when it takes milk from its mother. For the first few years of life, in fact, the mouth is the primary organ of discovery. As all parents know, small children stick every object they can get their hands on into their mouths. But the mouth is also the place of speech, and Painter’s Forms is an image not of devouring but of expelling a vocabulary for painting.

In Painting, Smoking, Eating (1973), Guston links three human activities, the latter two of which are undeniably oral. And because all lists give equal status to the noun inside it, painting is associated with smoking and eating. There is no hand visible in this picture. A man lies under the covers in bed, a cigarette stuffed in his invisible mouth. Beside him are the materials of his art. Again we see shoe soles. But we are unable to tell whether these soles, some heavily outlined, some dimmer, are representations of footwear or the footwear itself. It does not matter. What we witness is not a man actively painting but the stillness of a head and its wakeful dreaming. This smoking head allows things to come into it, consciously or unconsciously, willy-nilly. The boots that fill that doorway remind me of nothing so much as my own semisleep dreams in which forms keep changing and then sometimes fix themselves into an unsettling picture dredged up from a secret place in my own psyche.

In Guston there is a rare harmony between the poetic texts he often used in his drawings and the images near them, despite the fact that the drawings are never straightforward illustrations of the words. The poems of William Corbett and Clark Coolidge, for example, are inscribed into the drawing without disjunction. Guston wrote out the texts himself with his own hand. The drawings and the words are both gestural. Painter’s Forms is exactly what it says it is. Objects, Guston seems to tell us, are my new medium. Through them I articulate myself and the world in which I live. They are not limiting forms but liberating ones. They are outside me and inside me. They are of my body and not of it. Guston’s still lifes speak to the fact that the world penetrates us. We eat, smoke, and have sex. But language and images enter us, too. They become us. And in art they are spewed forth again, transfigured and renewed.

Still life is the art of the small thing, an art of holding on to the bits and pieces of our lives. Some of these things we glimpse in the frame of a painting are ephemeral — food, cut flowers, tobacco — and others, like the clutter in a dead man’s attic, are objects that will survive us. The paintings speak to our wish to live and to our dread of dying, but because the space inside the frame is a figment and the things it holds are imaginary, they have the eerie quality of the impossible: a permanent dream. I often dream of objects, and when I do, they are always close to my nose. I am pressed up against them — a toothbrush or a pair of scissors or a pen. They are dreams of uncanny scrutiny. Dreaming is part of living, and its images are a form of memory in which the stuff of the everyday is recycled. Art is a kind of memory, too. A sausage is reinvented on a canvas. I will never cut it or eat it. But it is there in a parallel space that I enter nevertheless, and even though Chardin’s painting is no longer in front of my eyes, the image remains. It has fixed itself in my mind as no real sausage ever could. Still life, like all art, happens through selection. One thing is chosen over another, and through the artist’s choice, my eyes find a new focus. Chardin’s painting is not a reflection of the tables laid with sausages and knives that I have seen in my own life but a spectral reincarnation of that familiarity. The experience of looking at art, like the experience of dreaming, is often more concentrated than waking life. Despite the inimitable present tense of every painting, it is always about the past. I do not mean its duration — how many years the canvas may have hung on a wall. I mean that what I am looking at is the representation of a thing which has a history in the mind and body of another person. I am looking at a work — at a “painter’s forms.” And this looking is a little like having someone else’s dream. Because the objects of still life are ordinary — a sausage, a melon, a bowl, a boot — their translation into paint intensifies them. They are dignified by the metamorphosis we call art.