still-life paintings in a consumer society

Leonardo

Still-Life Paintings in a Consumer SocietyAuthor(s): R. G. SaisselinSource: Leonardo, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Summer, 1976), pp. 197-203Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1573553 .

Accessed: 11/06/2014 02:51

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The MIT Press and Leonardo are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toLeonardo.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.92 on Wed, 11 Jun 2014 02:51:45 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1573553?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Leonardo, Vol. 9, pp. 197-203. Pergamon Press 1976. Printed in Great Britain

STILL-LIFE PAINTINGS IN A CONSUMER SOCIETY

R. . Saisselin* Abstract-The author analyzes the role and character of still-life painting as exemplified by the 'vanity' pictures of the 17th century, the autonomous still lifes of the 18th century, the still lifes nonillustrative of discourse of the 19th century and the Pop art still lifes dictated by the imperatives of 20th-century consumer societies.

His main attention is given to an interpretation of the impact on the art of a society in which commercial considerations override those of aesthetics. He finds that mass production and advertising deny not only art in the old sense, but also personal possession, originality and taste, since these are affected and effected by market research. Pop art still life in such a world can thus become an ironic comment upon the difficulties of individual choice and vision.

I.

The view from my window here in Paris extends to the littered street below where garbage cans have not been emptied for days. This not unusual situation results from the imperative to consume and the dissatisfaction of those who cannot consume as much as the others. The imperative has been developed by a combined operation of words, images, letters, signs and sounds in the form of advertisements designed to reduce passive perceivers to active consumers. This situation has had a signal effect on the recent history or 'post history', to use a Hegelian suggestion, of still-life painting.

Advertising may be defined as an illustration of a philosophy based on an economic definition of people where real, wrapped, purchasable and dis- posable objects triumph over painters, who are also called upon to buy now and pay later. The subject, too, rendered attractive in its protean multiplicity, takes revenge over moralists of old as the grinning skull of the vanity picture is replaced by the ultra- bright smile of bathing nymphs inviting viewers to savour the riches and romance of this world in which you, too, can live like a prince on the installment plan. The hidden persuader is the con- viction that there is no hell, and the fable of the bees, that moral tale of the mercantilist society, stripped of its Christian-satiric intent and overtones, becomes the ruling aesthetic, in a neo- Keynesian garb, of the world of affluence. Indeed, accepting the reasoning of Wyndham Lewis's Time and Western Man, advertisement turns out to be the romantic still-life par excellence: romantic in its appeal to the vast and unsatisfiable desires of

* Aesthetician, Dept. of Fine Art, University of Rochester, River Campus Station, Rochester, NY 14627, U.S.A. (Received 21 Dec., 1974.)

people, utilitarian in its effects and open-ended in its nature, since the desires cannot be satisfied but only replaced by new ones.

Thus, the difference in an affluent society between a still-life as a work of art and a still-life as an advertisement comes down to a question of sup- pressing the message. The affinities between a still-life in the Pop art style and an advertisement are more positive than their differences, for both have a common origin in the objective for publicity, which dominates the thought and language of the society. A digression on the relation of language to still-life painting is thus in order.

II.

The relation between language and still-life painting may be taken to be exemplified by four phases: (1) the 'vanity' picture of the 17th century (attributes, four seasons, four elements and five senses type of still lifes), (2) the autonomous still life of the 18th century, (3) the still lifes nonillustrative of discourse by painters such as Manet, Whistler and Cezanne in the 19th century and (4) the Pop art still lifes dictated by the imperatives of a 20th-century consumer society.

A. Vanity Pictures In vanity pictures, as in the art of portraiture,

objects served as attributes. They could be used as signs, they possessed associative or symbolic value and it is through these that they could evoke a silent poetry that could not be associated with narrative or specifically be connected with existing literary forms (Figs. 1 and 2). Clear meaning could be attached only when objects were specifically used as symbols. But aside from this linguistic use, objects possessed associative value. If, within the general conventions of representational art, such

197



R. G. Saisselin

.,;%l' ':N' at'd'~^ 'gi : I' -'

Fig. 1. Evaristo Baschenis (1607/17-1677). 'Musical Instruments', oil. (Ambrosiana, Milan, Italy.)

as obtained since the Renaissance, the still life as a genre represented a species of painting for its own sake, this is only relatively true in that it did not narrate an action as could the genre of paintings of historical events. It was 'pure' in another sense: the images rendered by still life could hardly be treated as well in another medium, such as drama and dance. In this respect, recent tendencies in literature are not without interest; for they go some way to illuminate what makes the difference between a still life and another genre within the same convention of representational art.

Gertrude Stein in Tender Buttons and other authors tried to produce a literature on the analogy of nonrepresentational painting of the cubist variety. Tender Buttons was not supposed to specifically mean or say anything, but rather to provide verbal patterns or a 'prose surface' analo- gous to what cubist painters did with lines and paint. Attention was thus displaced from meaning to the words themselves, from statements to patterns. As in nonrepresentational painting, the attention is supposedly shifted from an image with some correspondence to a site or objects in the real world to the painting as an object executed in a medium governed by its own aesthetic rules. Con- temporary writers have also been fascinated by the attractive power of visual as against purely verbal means of communication; or they have been interested in verbal means of noncommunication and books made up of photographs, as the work of Michel Butor with his Mobiles and the efforts of Alain Robbe-Grillet with the cinema and of Jirgen Becker with the novel.

These efforts leave something to be desired and may be founded on false analogies between literature, painting and the cinema. In any case, they do require a new approach to reading, if that is what one may still call the activity involving such book- objects. It may be that reading habits are such that one will seek meaning in a page of print even if a writer intended it to be looked at rather than read and pondered. As such, a page of print may be of more limited interest than the surface of a cubist painting or a classical still life that also does not specifically say anything. A book may be turned into an art object, but, for that, it need not be

Fig. 2 Jan (III) van de Velde. 'Glass of Wine with Cut Lemon', oil on oak panel, 31 x 24-5 cm, 1649. (Oeffentliche

Kunstsammlung, Basel, Switzerland.)

meaningless, merely a work of art in its print and binding. The closest literature may come to still life lies in the direction of concrete poetry. Com- pared to a complex still life and even a Chinese calligraphy, the interest of concrete poetry may be limited. These questions have become problematical and the future of the book is questioned even by writers.

But in the 17th century the problem of the relation between words and an object was in a sense settled by the unstated division of labor that regulated the various activities of poets, writers and painters. Saint-Amand, a French poet of the period, wrote a rather long poem on the virtues and qualities of the melon: a playful homage to its taste, smell, weight, color and comparative qualities with other fruits, but there is no attempt to make a descriptive poem of it. The poet can only write about; he cannot depict a melon, as can a painter. Edmund Burke, the British orator, recognized in the following century that poetry was not strictly an imitative art, because words did not resemble the ideas for which they stood. The rivalry between words and objects, or to use the language of the abbe Du Bos, an 18th-century French critic much concerned with this question, the rivalry between abstract signs and natural signs, word-images and visual images, developed precisely in the 18th century in which certain poets wrote long descriptive poems that strove to approach a picture.

B. The 18th-Century Autonomous Still Life The autonomous still life of the 18th century is

198



Still-life Paintings in a Consumer Society

Fig. 4. FranFois Foisse. 'The Library', oil, 23-5 x 29 5 in. (Courtesy the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Conn.,

U.S.A.)

Fig. 3. FranCois Desportes (1661-1743). 'Nature morte', oil, 98 x 92 cm. (Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Paris.)

more difficult to analyze (Figs. 3 and 4). This phase is marked by a certain imbalance in favor of the written and spoken word. Discourse was then a powerful instrument. Philosophical prose, didactic and descriptive poetry, treatises, satires and critic- ism were considered better instruments for pro- voking thought and political changes than paintings and toward the end of the century paintings often came to be considered as adjuncts to the written word.

But there was another important problem as concerns the relationship between discourse and painting. It is the unstated assumption of what can be called the interchangeability of the various artistic expressions of the time, because each of them was regarded as one form of a universal expressive or imitative language. What this means for still life and its relation to language is implied in certain aspects of Diderot's Salons. Thus, dis- cussing Chardin in the Salon of 1765, he writes: 'Choose a site, dispose on this site the objects in the manner I shall indicate, and you may be sure you shall have seen his pictures'. Passing from the written description of a Chardin to its mental image is supposedly possible because both the written description and the painting described have that essential quality of communication in common, an image. What is forgotten is that a painting is a painting, not a literary description or even a mental image. It made sense in the 18th century because of the assumption of the universality of communication and reason, the supposition of a universal language of mankind that varied in time and place but progressed historically and psychologically from sounds, gestures, dance, music, poetry, to prose ever more refined, to ultimately find its clearest and most reliable expression in the form

of mathematics. Painting, like poetry and music, was but one form of expression or imitation and, therefore, communication in a general movement toward higher forms. Thus, Hegel deduced that philosophy would eventually replace the arts. This may well be true, though it may also be a philosophical-literary prejudice to think so. The forms of expression and of imitation may be discontinuous despite multi-media experimentation. In any case, the prestige of painting at the end of the 18th century owed much to the notion that its primary function was to illustrate thought.

C. Still Lifes Nonillustrative of Discourse The third phase of the relation between language

and still-life painting came from the realization that painting did not have to illustrate thought as discourse (Figs. 5 and 6). This phase must be understood in terms of the differences rather than the similarities between the various means of expression of the arts. The essence of the problem was wittily put by the French poet Mallarme in a conversation with Degas who, dining one day at Berthe Morisot's, complained of the difficulties that he had in writing a sonnet: 'What a job,' he cried, 'I've lost a whole day on a damned sonnet without advancing a step . . . And yet it is not for lack of ideas . . . I'm filled with them . . . I've too many . . .' To which Mallarme answered softly: 'But Degas, one does not write verses with ideas, but with words.' The results of this aesthetic are far-reaching in all the arts. Some of Mallarme's more hermetic poems are in a sense verbal objects: the value is put on words, sounds, musicality, rather than verbal images, that survive, but in a suggestive rather than clear manner. The poems take distance from discourse as in nonrepresentational painting where the image is sacrificed to paint, lines, forms and texture. Thus the poem comes to be regarded as a species of verbal ikon. As Archibald McLeish would later put it: 'A poem should not mean but be'. As seen with the work of Manet, a parallel development and realization

199



R. G. Saisselin

. - ....... * IL

.

_ ,,~- -L

.

_

Fig. 5. Georges Braque. 'Plums, Pears, Nuts and Knife', oil, 9 x 28-75 in., 1926. (The Phillips Collection, Washing-

ington, D.C.)

Fig. 6. Giorgio Morandi. 'Still Life', oil, 14 i x 18-} in., 1955. (The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.)

was underway in painting that would reach its apogee with the work of Cezanne and the cubists. The writings of Gertrude Stein and concrete poems may also derive from what can be described as a nostalgia for nonverbal art.

In view of this aesthetic based on the differences between means of expression rather than the language of images, a still life, for example, need not be an accurate representation of an apple or the representation of an idea of an apple; it may be merely indicated or suggested. The change of status of works of art effected by Manet, Mallarme, Whistler and others is in effect a rejection of the 18th-century's image-as-language view of art; the discursive, narrative, representational, imitative element ceased to be a primary consideration. Thus the classical still life had had its day; for it rested on a far less subjective view of the arts. But, of course, the object remained and, indeed, it may be argued that the 18th-century's view of art-as- communication would also make a most flashy return, bringing in its wake a renewed use of still life.

D. Still Life in a Consumer Society In much of today's world, indeed already in that

of Mallarme and Whistler, the object has become ever-present-an ubiquitous reality. Primarily it is a consumer item and, if the object itself is not always visible, its image is as a photograph, poster or a verbal description. It is the combination of this mass of consumer goods, images and words that marks the fourth stage in the relation between still life and language and it is inseparable from the

techniques of advertising. The rapport between image and discourse is closer to the symbolic use of objects in 'vanity' than to 'autonomous' still lifes. The image is now used as and turns into a sign of communication with arbitrary significance. However, the use of images to sell a product is anything but new and still-life painting was potentially advertising from the moment that it was secularized. If much secular (that is, non-vanity) still-life painting escaped this fate in the past, it is because society was not wholly governed by commercial considerations. But in the period of mercantilism, images were sometimes used as signs of certain activities. Thus Michel de Bouillon's still life of silverware is not a 'pure' still life but a goldsmith's sign (Fig. 7). But is it an advertisement in the usual sense of the term? One may call it a pre-literary advertisement: the objects are used as in attribute pictures but one cannot say that they induce the viewer to consume. It merely indicates an activity and the product of that activity. The modern advertisement is far more insistent for it is meant to move viewers to make a purchase. The power of communication of an artisan's sign is less heightened than that of moder advertising, which has recourse to words and to almost any technique that has been devised.

m.

As advertisement or Pop art, anonymous or signed, collective or individual, single or in series, the still life today owes its formal qualities and its appearance to shop windows, subway posters, bill- boards and glossy magazines. Like Impressionism, the former indoor art of still-life painting has become very much subject to the outdoors, though it may be used inside shops, supermarkets, trans- port stations and books. As Pop art, the contemporary still life may decorate an ultra-modern clinically shiny living room.

Wherever people go they will be called upon to serve the consumer society and be exposed to objects real or represented. It is thus no wonder

Fig. 7. Michel de Bouillon. 'Goldsmith's Sign', oil, 80 x 90 cm, 1707. (Mus6e des Arts D6coratifs, Paris.)

200




that such a society is in a period of vast production of still lifes in various media. It is now possible to purchase for about US$10.00 large still lifes of cheeses or fruits (up to 50 x 100 cm color photographs) for the purpose of decorating a kitchen. They are often plasticized for better conservation and may be wiped like the kitchen walls. In the same shop one may also purchase a Pop art painting of sausages richly ladened with mustard that, given a sense of humor and a low modern living room, will do well behind an international style couch.

The buffets, served tables, rustic luncheons of the classical still life have turned into advertisements; or, on a more serious level, the richly laden tables of the Flemish school, replaced by the supermarket, find an echo in the work of, for example, Richard Estes (Fig. 8). Peter Blake's 'Toy Shop' combines a similar vision of the world of plenty with the modern technique of incorporating a real object, such as a door. Thus, the contemporary still life uses a variety of techniques: collage, assemblage, photography and representational painting. The flatness and lack of the silent poetry of classical still lifes, often due to the chiaroscuro of an enclosed space, in short the commercial look, finds echoes in Pop art still lifes painted mainly in the new acrylics. Wayne Thiebaud's 'Ladies' Shoes', delicate of touch, fine in execution, unites that old medium, oil paint, with the directness of statement of an advertisement, or, perhaps more true to fact, an assortment of shoes on a shelf in a shoe store [cf. Leonardo 2, 65 (1969)]. Gerald Murphy's 'Razor' (Fig. 9), with its flat pattern, simplicity, may be said to reflect the printed page, traditional medium for a message, or, more simply, a poster.

But why indeed should artists still bother imitating in a world of plenty, shortcuts and mass production? Since objects in themselves can be contemplated aesthetically as they are, since window dressing itself is an art of arranging still lifes, why not simply exhibit objects as they are? If a urinal can be a work of sculpture, then almost

Fig. 8. Richard Estes. 'The Candy Store', synthetic polymer and oil, 47-75 x 68-75 in., 1969. (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Gift of the Friends of the

Whitney Museum.)

Fig. 9. Gerald Murphy. 'Razor', oil, 32 x 36 in., 1922. (Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. Foundation for the Arts

Collection. Gift of Mr. Gerald Murphy.)

any object can serve as a still life. The motif of the hanging object on a trompe l'oeil wooden panel need no longer be painfully executed. It is necessary only to choose the objects and to photograph them; thus, one has a still-life photograph, such as was produced already in the 19th century by, among others, Adolph Braun.

But indeed, why bother photographing objects at all? Jim Dine hangs '32 Colorful Tools' on a board fixed to a canvas, resulting in something that evidently borders on an easel painting. These tools will not hang in the tool shed, where they might not be still lifes; they have been selected to figure as works of art and they may enter a living room or a museum. But objects to be still lifes need not be hung, photographed or merely selected and disposed on some surface. The contemporary artist Pavlos makes a species of still lifes out of paper sheets cut into the shape of traditional still- life objects. He encases the cuttings in Plexiglas, so that they gain the qualities of sculpture in the round and yet with a traditional and delicate quality. Significantly, Pavlos's still lifes are cut out of advertisement paper. Pictorial art, thus, lies not so much in the skill of representation as in a selection within the possibilities of the mass- produced world of objects in the post-Hegelian world.

IV.

It may be said that with Pop art and other recent styles of still life, the commercial world penetrates the interior of what was once a private world. From the 17th through the 19th century the patrician interior had been devised to stress the separation of public and private worlds. Still lifes found a place within a private universe, even more intimate than a private gallery. Toward the end of the 19th century it is unlikely that even an aesthete would have introduced a poster into his salon; but

201



R. G, Saisselili

today in the U.S.A., with the blurring of the distinctions between the commercial and the non- commercial, posters as well as Pop art still lifes have their privileged place in homes. Such items as colorful tools hanging in a living room or a museum pose fascinating problems for aesthet- icians.

Consider soup cans contained in boxes for ship- ment. Some boxes contain cans full of soup and others, with a remarkable likeness, contain cans without soup; the former sell at the regular market price, but the latter cost much more. Thus art maintains itself in the midst of a consumer society, despite Hegel's prediction of the end of art. The surface appearance, beauty and rarity of an object no longer play an important aesthetic role. The differences between the categories of objects lie in negative qualities: absence of content, absence of utility, absence of soup. The similarity of art objects and commercial objects would seem to indicate a shift from aesthetic to commercial value, but only partially, for the aesthetic has merely changed its nature from a positive admiration of beauty to the negative aesthetics of nihilism. Art, however, still retains its power to confer distinction: the owner of non-soup boxes distinguishes himself from the millions who can afford only to have boxes of cans with soup in them.

The contrast with the situation that obtained in the mercantilist and physiocratic economies of the 18th century is illuminating. Then the class of consumers was very small and privileged, whereas the class of producers was the generality of mankind maintaining itself on a bare subsistence level and producing the net product enjoyed by the consumers as luxuries. Thence, the special character of goods of the mercantilist world in the form of rare, valuable and beautiful objects. The possession of such goods was deemed worthy of being depicted, for the still life acted as a species of indirect portrait of a possessor. The indirect portrait of a person offered by Pop art still lifes is perhaps that of a spiritual poverty compensated by investment acumen. Disinterested contemplation, evidently made possible by comfortable and at times immense wealth, is transformed into interested and differentiating purchasing. Those who need boxes of filled soup cans will have them and those who need art will have boxes of empty ones.

V.

Many objects have become overfamiliar and insistently present; thence, the phenomenon of the surrealistic object, the found object and the unusual object being elevated to the status of an aesthetic object, which is quite independent of any picture of it. It is, of course, the depiction of cans of soup or of fried eggs that renders Pop art still lifes somewhat ironical. At the same time an objectifi- cation of an object has been effected: ways of seeing are affected not only by aesthetic considerations but also by economic factors; for in a capitalist

society, economics is not subordinate to non- economic values, it is the overriding aesthetic. The familiar and in a sense personal items of old-the copper kettles of Chardin, the mugs of Harnett, the pewter of Claes and the beautiful musical instruments of Baschenis-have become rare and prized and displaced by ubiquitous consumer items. Objects cease to be at a distance, bathed in an atmosphere of humility, familiarity or luxury in a home designed for other intimate activities such as reading, dining in the company of friends or even praying.

Consumer objects press upon one. They are not presented, they are exposed; they are not so much there for their own sakes, as in the autonomous classical still life, but rather as aspects of applied economics. An object is a sign and this quality of being a sign within the vast number of consumer objects and consumer acts points to one of the salient features of Pop art still lifes-their immateri- ality. They no longer possess the visual and tactile values of the object represented, or even, thinking of Cezanne and Morandi, of the autonomy of the art of painting in oils. The apples of color photography, the objects in acrylic, may have the form that they represent, but somehow the techniques available and used today are such that I find that there is a denaturalization of the object, something flat, flashy and unfeeling about acrylic. What is presented is not appealing, not appetizing; it is not prized, it is not loved, it is not enviable, it is exposed for purchase.

A consumer society, as the novelist Mary McCarthy pointed out years ago in an analysis of the U.S.A., is not materialist at all, because materials are not prized. The victuals presented to view either in reality or in Pop art still lifes are not invitations to touch, taste and enjoy, but merely to consume. To be sure, there are areas of resist- ance in which the supermarket and its wrappings have not yet gained a victory and, when one wanders down the rue de Buci in Paris or down streets in other old cities still not fully 'developed', one begins to understand early Flemish still lifes of served tables, butchers' shops and the hanging game of 18th-century France. There was something about these still lifes that even today succeed in prompting Proustian involuntary memory in front of a van Beyeren ham, a recall of pre-cellophane days.

The luxury item of old supposed a scarcity economy. Gold was associated with a universal standard of value, in part because it was also beautiful. Thus, a luxury item was not considered a consumer item. In a consumer society, an item fits into a general way of life that is made up of consumer relations in which everything from sex to knowledge, sentiments to culture, automobiles and furniture, fit into a series and take on the aspect of a consumer sign. Humans are defined in new terms and the objects with which they surround themselves no longer define their stations in life, but their purchasing power and their manipulations

202




of the signs of the consumer society, whose values are wholly arbitrary, since they may be changed easily as new consumer needs are invented.

The social types who could be dimly perceived by means of the attribute function of objects in classical still lifes no longer obtain. Classical still lifes indirectly portrayed a variety of social types: affluent merchant, collector, warrior, priest, philosopher, painter, poet, architect, musician, even the figure of death, the humble country or town dweller as well as the courtly prince. The representative type of a consumer society may well be the junk man who, along with the producer and consumer, might fit into a new Pop trinity.

It is as if in the consumer society the junk man had replaced the skull of the old vanity picture; for he may be thought of as symbolic of the vanity of human consumption. Anti-artistic, anti-hero, anti- curator, anti-entrepreneur, the junk man has become a most necessary person. But his existence and constant presence implies a radical change in relation between the producer and the consumer such as it obtained in the period of the classical still life. Then the ties that united the producer of a still life and its purchaser, and which might be used to symbolize wider relations, implied care for beauty, pride of craftsmanship, stability, patience and the exchange of stable values, whereas in a consumer society purely economic relations are presided over by an aesthetic of action (selling and buying) whose point of perfection is reached when nothing is sold for something.

VI.

These economic-social considerations of a consumer society are not out of place in an essay on still life; one begins with pictures of objects at rest within tell-tale interiors that define a certain view of human pride of possession and of human activities and vanities, to end with considerations on a world of objects in which the depicted Pop art still life is but one very expensive consumer item among masses of others also presenting an indirect picture of the human condition. The proliferation of antique and bric-a-brac shops has created a still-life environment with consumer, surrealistic and vanity overtones. But these shops and the junk yards too, are the source of more art, an art born of bric-a-brac and of junk. The materials of old-silver, gold, marble, fine wood, oil paint and lead pencils-yield to plastics, acrylics and com- posites of various junk. Artists, as is well known, use the materials of their own time and in a world of continuous junkification and discards still-life painters tend to become a species of surrealist,

dadaist or satirist, because the objects at their disposal are mass-produced, impersonal, packaged and marketed so widely and efficiently that represented as isolated objects or selected as a series to be represented as a work of art they take on the aspect of unwonted objects, not privileged, but amusing.

In the age of the classical still life, the few isolated objects chosen by painters became privileged, made worthy of attention, raised to the level of beauty, by art and also by the use of frames. But now frames are broken by the very mass of objects produced as mass production turns into the anti-art enterprise, which explains why even anti-artists producing anti-art end up by producing art objects, in spite of themselves; for collectors and critics know that it is imagination that makes for art, not always intentions. Mass production denies not only art in the old sense, but also personal possession, originality and taste, since these are affected and effected by market research. A still life in such a world can thus become an ironic comment upon the difficulties of individual choice and vision. It is significant that still-life painting in its classic phase appeared at the end of the Renaissance, that is, along with the development of individual thought, the personal conscience of Protestantism, individual contemplative thinkers and it may also be that its history as the representation of individual objects, with personality, senti- ment and beauty, corresponds to the history of portraiture that also had a beginning, middle and end.

In a world of mass-produced objects and discards, the Pop art still life is a telling image. In its thin and functional frame, when there is one, on canvas or board, in oil, acrylic or some other new and quick-drying medium, with its new, plastic, shiny, commercial feel, as image or assemblage, as individual item or environment, may one not behold the truth of the claims of the consumer society? The objects have lost their savor and personality:

between the object and the desire, between the desire and the touch, stretches the cellophane.

In the U.S.A., I live in a world of abstractions. Paper money replaced gold and silver long ago; credit cards replace paper money; wealth itself has become abstract and in some areas problematical. The now-world is the no-world of the discard and the junk man is the shepherd of the hollow men.

203



still-life paintings in a consumer society

Documents