The still-life in general is one of my favorite genres of painting, and it is easy to be skeptical of why I find them so fascinating and engaging. By definition, the form is fairly simply: inanimate and often common objects arranged on a surface. By convention, what is depicted includes fruit or food, maybe flowers, and one or two other elements besides the table on which they all rest. This sounds guaranteed to drain all possibility of excitement from the work, but to me, the result is the opposite: a thrill, almost a distillation of the essence of art.
Using his talent and limited tools, the still-life painter uses one thing (pigments and paints on a surface) to make present a completely different thing (let us say, a lemon). Now, you cannot squeeze that lemon into your tea, but there is no denying its lemonness. How cool is that? But wait, there’s more: In doing this, the successful still-life painter also conveys more than that, including what he as an observer sees in that lemon; and what the lemon, as a thing itself, makes present beyond its own simple lemonhood. The presentation of any simple thing can make present, in an allusive or evocative way, a completely other thing, even a reality that is itself intangible or invisible.
In other words, a good still life is an exploration and presentation of reality and our experience of it, which is I think why it works best with simple and familiar things that everyone already understands somewhat, and is ready to understand more.
What makes Cezanne’s still-lifes worth a blockbuster exhibition and a trip across the country (or at least into the city!) is his unique insight into and rendering of this process, of things both being present and making present other things.
“I paint as I see, as I feel,” Cezanne once remarked, “and I have very strong sensations.” …The resulting works are deeply subjective and strangely moving, especially when viewed in a series, observed one of the commentaries printed on the gallery walls. This rendering of sensations, and their uniqueness to him, he shared with fellow artist and friend Camille Pissarro, alongside whom he painted on many occasions. As Pissarro recalled, “We were always together, but what cannot be denied is that each of us kept the only thing that counts, the unique sensation.” Predictably, Pissarro’s paintings are different from Cezanne’s, even when painted at the same time of the same subject, as was demonstrated in the exhibit.
Now all this was delightful and delicious for me, and I spent two hours in this exhibit alone, which must be weighed against my desire to see many, many other great works in that amazing museum, which I had never before visited (that took another four hours). But one of the features of the exhibit that raised my eyebrows was the inclusion of several other plaques with observations by artists of our own time.
This one caught my attention right at the start: I wonder what this landscape would have looked like to us without colonization?... But how do you just see the formal properties of a painting or the scholarship or the invention his work invokes without foregrounding that history?
Others were less ideological, but no more intelligible: All in all, I think Cezanne’s quest was for the affirmation of his own eternity, driven by a monumental persistence.
This pictorial technique Cezanne would further develop as a catalyst for abstract painting of the 20th century: that liquid plain of painting hinged to a corporeal past that is not past.
It seemed to me that the current artists quoted were also fixated on their sensations, but, unlike Cezanne’s, their sensations were no longer of the objects observed, much less of the realities they made present, but rather of their own preoccupations and imaginings.
I was deeply relieved to learn that I was not the only one to draw this conclusion, when I read one of these commentaries simultaneously with the patron next to me and we both failed completely to stifle our snorts and chortles. So, this lovely couple and I had a little moment of communion there, as we laughed together – always within the boundaries of museum decorum, of course! – at the inanity of many of these learned pronouncements.
This commentary only reinforced my awareness that we, as a culture, have forgotten (and been willfully deprived of) what we used to know. Our ability to behold reality and understand it has been disassembled and discarded, leaving many of our leaders, teachers, and guides incapable of presenting anything besides their own selfish feelings. It is no wonder that our public discourse resembles a room full of unchaperoned four-year-old only children: Mine! No! I WANT it! Ow!
Our “arts” have abandoned the great power that man has in creating art to make present what is absent and make visible what is invisible. This is our mirror-image likeness of God’s power to do the very same thing not only in allusion and evocation, but also in effect; that is, to use one thing to bring about the actual presence in reality of another thing. This power, we call sacramentality. We who are in the image and likeness of the Creator show and share this power in art: not just in the visual arts, like painting, but in all of them: music, literature, poetry, theater.
Another genre for which Cezanne is famous is his groups of nudes collectively called “bathers”. One of the artists quoted on a plaque there opined: What I like most about looking at his bathers…is how they remind me of what it feels like to be renewed. Perhaps this feeling also reflects the notion that water represents a source of life, an instrument of cleansing, and a means of regeneration in virtually all cultures. Is this why I so strongly correlate the bathers motif with the notion of renewal?
Gosh, I wonder where he could have possibly come up with that idea? Clearly, he has some shadowy awareness of what our God has revealed to us, perfected, and elevated to the level of the divine in the sacrament of Baptism. Or, it could just be that his shadowy awareness is the universal human starting point, looking for meaning, looking for reality, the question on every mind and in every heart.
God answers that question univocally in Jesus Christ, who makes visible the invisible God; who takes human flesh and makes present divine life and glory; who takes a day, even a moment, and fills it with eternity; who takes bread, and makes it Him.
To use one thing to make present another thing: this power, we call sacramentality. Every true artist uses it. The excitement of still-lifes is that they reveal this power. Seeing this power at work is exciting, because you have it.
