Even if Cezanne’s apples are unique in their “appleyness,” to use D.H. Lawrence’s word, between striking paintings of faces and battle scenes, one can quickly walk past an arrangement of objects, glossing over the painter’s mastery over an apple’s unwaxed skin or banana’s edge. We know apples. We know bananas. Right?
Before supermarkets—and their year round offerings of fruit from all over the world—still life paintings might’ve been the only place you could see an apple in January or a banana in Europe. Paintings like Mélanie de Comoléra’s Still Life with Grapes and Flowers, foreground key limes and jalapeño peppers, New World ingredients that, before colonialism, would have been unrecognizable to everyday Europeans.
That’s no longer our reality. I can’t, despite my best intentions, not be someone who grew up with access to beautiful fruits, even if, when dropped in the corner of my divided Tupperware lunchbox, those grapes hardly look as beautiful as when de Comoléra paints them between nettle stems and fireworks of bee balms. (And I did, by the way, have to Google extensively to figure out that those red flowers are probably North American bee balm, and even now, I’m only 90% sure.)
I am not particularly well trained to identify flowers or fish, though I’ve eaten plenty of foods my great-grandmother could not have imagined. I am, like many of us, hyper-aware of my consumption without much understanding of its cost. I could blame climate change, inflation, social media, or the recent memory of Christmas shopping, but really, I just live in a part of the world where materialism has its own culture of obliviousness. Access to things feels inevitable, like the pile of yellow bananas at the supermarket restocked each day, even through the shortage that’s being called a banana pandemic.
three still lifes
Édouard Manet
Hannah Brown Skeele
Odilon Redon
Of course, nothing is inevitable. The name “still life,” is taken from the Dutch “stilleven,” but in Spanish, these paintings are called “naturaleza muerta.” This translates literally to something like “nature stilled,” but the term also holds an allusion to death. In Italian, it’s “natura morta;” in French, “nature morte.”
One of my favorite moments for still life in the museum is in Gallery 211, where Francisco de Zurbarán’s The Crucifixion hangs beside Juan Sánchez Cotán’s Still Life with Game Fowl.
Crucifixion is stunning on its own. Austere, isolated, clear, and human.
But the graceful suffering the Zurbarán conveys gains richer meaning mirrored beside Cotán’s quail and ducks. Each bird hangs from its beak as heavily as the blooming cabbage, as pristinely as the apple with a leaf still attached to its stem. Beneath the hanging birds and vegetables is a squash cleaved open to bare its seeds, an allusion to the fact that regardless of how whole these hanging things seem, each one will eventually be transformed by a knife.
Everything dies. That’s one of those things people like to talk about with still life—sure, the fruit is perfect in this painting, but we know the tableau decayed 200 years ago. Death can come in forms as innocuous as rot, as complicated as consumption, or as brutal as the state murder of a man who spent his life pursuing justice for the oppressed. But there are a few things in the gallery that seem to defy the effects of time: the legacy of the man martyred for peace, the richly preserved oil paint cared for by world-class conservators, and the squash’s seeds, held in neat little rows by the sinews of fruit.
—Amina Khan, editor, Communications
