Spanierman Gallery, LLC is pleased to announce the opening on January 19, 2010 of American Still-Life Paintings (1829-2009), an exhibition of works by American artists dating from the 1850s to the present. The exhibition includes over seventy works and is accompanied by a brochure with a text by William H. Gerdts, professor emeritus of art history, Graduate School of the City of New York and author of Painters of a Humble Truth: Masterpieces of American Still-Life, 1801-1939 (1984) and American Still-Life Painting (1967). The artists represented include Thomas Hart Benton, Patrick Henry Bruce, Arthur Beecher Carles, Emil Carlsen, William Glackens, Claude Raguet Hirst, John Frederick Peto, and Severin Roesen.
As Professor Gerdts notes, still-life was ranked at the bottom of the hierarchy of the arts from the seventeenth century well into the nineteenth due to the obviously fallacious notion that still-life painting was merely imitative of “the real thing,” and as such neither inspiring nor difficult to execute. In the twentieth century, the realization of the appeal, the inspirational, the necessary technical mastery, and certainly the individuality of the still-life masters and their achievements were universally recognized, and still lifes have subsequently become treasured components of the arts in all nations, sought after by private and public collectors, some of the latter specializing only in that genre.
Still life did not exist in the colonial era, but gradually the genre gained recognition and adherents in the newly formed United States. The country’s early engagement with it began with the achievements of the Peale family of Philadelphia, especially of James Peale and his nephew, Raphaelle, here represented by James’s Still Life with Fruit, of 1829. Still-life painting again faded in the 1830s after James’s death, but it revived in the later years of the 1840s, when gracious living dictated the need for attractive, decorative pictures, especially for dining rooms. George Henry Hall was among the artists who best fulfilled this demand, in elaborate arrangements of detailed, richly colored forms such as Spring of 1870, in which Hall perpetuated the style influenced by the truth-to-nature precepts of the English theorist John Ruskin that he had adopted earlier. The mid-nineteenth century was also the time when a group of German and other European émigrés from the liberal wars of 1848 arrived, including still life specialists, the most celebrated and prolific being Severin Roesen, who settled in New York in 1848, and then moved on to a number of Pennsylvania towns. Other artists essayed still life occasionally and to brilliant results, as here in David Johnson’s Dish of Apples and Quince ca. 1857, in which the mid-century interest in scientific detail is demonstrated in the artist’s careful renderings of individual properties of each fruit, including their blemishes and age spots.
Still-life painting gradually became recognized as a major achievement in the arts in this country as artists explored a diversity of new strategies. These included the inspiration from trompe l’oeil (eye-deceiving) realism as in the work of Victor Dubreuil, Nicholas Alden Brooks, Thomas Hope, and Claude Raguet Hirst, one of few women practitioners of this genre, represented in this exhibition by a crisp watercolor in which the writing in the well-worn pages of an eighteenth-century book of supernatural tales can be read. Artists of a more lyrical persuasion, such as Edith Mitchill Prellwitz, also investigated still life, as a counterpart to their poetic figural paintings. Some, like Emil Carlsen, made still life in this vein a specialty. In addition, while first-generation American Impressionists, devoted to painting in the out-of-doors, did not investigate the genre to great extent, their occasional forays into still life produced vibrant paintings such as Annie Gooding Sykes’s Vase of Yellow and Red Tulips and Lillies. Later, when William Glackens switched from scenes of New York life to a more Renoir-inspired aesthetic, he produced a great number of truly Impressionist still lifes. By the turn of the century, there were still-life artists who even dominated the artistic scene in other parts of the country, perhaps most notably the flower painter, Paul de Longpré in Los Angeles, a city where there is a street named after him (read our blog post on this).
Ironically, it was the inspiration drawn from European modernism that really opened the door to a new respect for still life. This occurred when the works of Cézanne and also Matisse first came to be admired (even worshipped by younger American painters), written about by American critics, and gradually put on view in New York and elsewhere in the early twentieth century. Patrick Henry Bruce is one such painter who held tremendous admiration for both French artists, studying with Matisse in Paris, and producing still lifes and landscapes combining his modernist aesthetic with that of Cézanne, as is well seen in the several paintings of fruit and flowers in the present exhibition. Other modernists who investigated a variety of themes, such as Abraham Baylinson, Ben Benn, Arthur B. Carles, Clarence Holbrook Carter, and Preston Dickinson included still life in their repertory. There were more conservative artists in this era, also, who chose to include elegant objets d’art as the main focus of their attention, such as ancient glass or oriental ceramics. One of the most prolific was Hovsep Pushman, whose work, enveloped in mystery, was conceived with a subtle balance between accuracy and painterliness.
Mid-twentieth century emphasis on abstraction, of course, had little use for still life, but there were major artists who defied this move away from visual reality and created paintings of intense actuality, probably the most notable being Luigi Lucioni, as in his Nostalgic Echoes of 1954. In the vast variety of artistic approaches that have developed in the post-modern era, still-life painting has found a renewed appreciation among artists of both realist and experimental strategies, many of them, such as Yin Yong Chun, Sarah Lamb, Kate Lehman, Gayle Blair Tate, and Lynn Veitzer, all represented in the present exhibition.
