Still Life
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Still-life painting flourished in Europe particularly in Holland in the seventeenth century, and examples were brought to America by the Dutch. Early still-life painters in America were mainly self-taught; their work is among the best examples of early American folk art. Shop signs from this period often incorporated elements of still life--an effective method of advertising to those customers who could not read.
The first truly accomplished American masters were members of the Peale family of Philadelphia. The Peales excelled in painting pristine tabletop groupings of glassware and fruit, as in James Peale's Fruit Still Life with Chinese Export Basket. Early nineteenth-century painters like the Peales practiced still life as a science. They possessed a deep curiosity for the natural world and felt that these detailed renderings were an extension of scientific inquiry. The works of Martin Johnson Heade are also composed in this spirit. Although created with the objective eye of a naturalist, Heade's studies of flowers and birds are invested with poetic atmosphere; they are some of the most striking still-life works in American art.
In the late nineteenth century, William Harnett, John Frederick Peto, and others used this emphasis on close observation for a different purpose. They deftly simulated shadows and reflections, colors and textures in illusionistic still lifes designed to fool the eye of the viewer. Their skill made them the leading practitioners of trompe l'oeil painting. With meticulous clarity, they depicted old books, paper money, photographs, and envelopes as if they were extending from the canvas, as in John Haberle's Imitation.
At the same time other artists adopted a different approach, showing more interest in painterly technique and the tactile qualities of objects. The still lifes of William Merritt Chase and Emil Carlsen display the influence of European art centers including Munich, Düsseldorf, and Paris. The vigorous brushwork and impressionistic style that characterize these works has little in common with the illusionism of Harnett, but it also found favor with the American public.
In the twentieth century, still-life painting continued to be transformed by successive modernist styles. The still-life works of Charles Demuth combine the fragmented space of cubism with nuanced attention to organic forms. Charles Sheeler's precisionist still life has the clean lines and quiet solidity more often seen in his landscapes of industrial America. The constrast between accurate representation and modernist style was best explored by Georgia O'Keeffe, who uses both realism and abstractions of the natural world.
During the mid- and late twentieth century, meaning and subject matter in still-life painting was again transformed and expanded. Pop artists substituted soup and beer cans for the more traditional fruit, flowers, or books. Wayne Thiebaud expressed the optimism of America in the 1950s and 1960s with his seemingly endless arrays of cakes and pies. These objects no longer carry subtle moral messages but have become icons of a consumer-driven culture. Richard Diebenkorn's Still Life becomes a self-portrait--a study of the artist through his tools, personal items, and working environment. Throughout his career Jim Dine incorporated common objects into his work that were meaningful in his own life--such as tools, bathrobes, and hearts. Through repetition over time these objects take on meaning for the viewer as well as the artist. Dine's The Gate, Goodbye Vermont combines elements of still life and sculptural asssemblage to evoke a particular sense of place and point in time.
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