Volume 40, Number 1 & 2 · January 14, 1993
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By John Golding
Picasso and Things: The Still Lifes of Picasso Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Grand Palais, Paris
by Jean Sutherland Boggs, with essays by Marie-Laure Bernadac, by Brigitte Léal. Catalog of the exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the
The Cleveland Museum of Art/distributed by Rizzoli, 371 pp., $75.00
Picasso: Collected Writings
edited and with an introduction by Marie-Laure Bernadac, by Christine Piot, preface by Michel Leiris
Abbeville, 454 pp., $150.00
Still life as we now accept it emerged as a subject in its own right in Flanders and Holland in the sixteenth century; the English phrase derives from the Dutch stilleven. Still life never appealed to English patrons, who preferred pictures of their dogs and horses. The French, after toying with various alternatives—my own favorite is vie coy or vie tranquille—settled for the somewhat chilling nature morte, possibly in indirect acknowledgment of the fact that many of the earliest still lifes produced by France's neighbors had been memento mori or vanitas paintings, reflections on the finality of death and the transience of earthly pleasures. But the genre flourished in France, and in the eighteenth century Chardin endowed it with a totally new grace and humanity, even though still life remained marked as the lowest order of painting.
Review, 3262 words
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