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Still life runs deep
And at the MFA, Paul Cézanne plumbs the depths
BY JEFFREY GANTZ

" Impressionist Still Life "
At the Museum of Fine Arts through June 9.


Still life is not ordinarily the stuff that blockbusters are made of. It’s too sedate, too domestic, too modest to command the attention of museumgoers for whom landscapes explore the majesty of God’s creation (or the agony of His absence) and portraits reveal the image of God (or the Devil) in humankind. What can cut flowers and a few pieces of fruit have to tell us? Yet it took just one piece of fruit to get us expelled from the Garden of Eden. And the greatest artists have been drawn to that mystery ever since, from the fifth-century-BC Greek painter Zeuxis to the 12th-century Chinese painter Zhao Ji, from Rome to Rembrandt and on to the Impressionists and Picasso. The Museum of Fine Arts has assembled some 90 Impressionist still lifes by the likes of Manet, Monet, Degas, Pissarro, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cézanne in the hope that the magic " I " word will pack them in.

A midweek visit did not confirm that that’s going to be the case. Which is too bad given that some of the world’s great paintings are here (most of them in the final room). In terms of theme, the show does sprawl: you’ll find, in addition to fruit and flowers, boots, skulls, dead birds, dead fish, a ham, assorted vegetables, cups, pitchers, jugs and jars, wineglasses, a child sitting on a verandah, and a shopgirl in a milliner’s establishment. (I was about to conclude that anything with fewer than two persons appeared to qualify before remembering that Mary Cassatt’s Tea is here, looking more like a book jacket for a Henry James novel than a still life.) Less might have been more — certainly more focus would have helped. And the rooms of the Gund Gallery are oddly bereft of the MFA’s usual thematic pointing: once you pass the introductory wall text, there’s only the labels for the works themselves. The show’s outline is roughly chronological, but the rooms have no particular identity, and though some attempt has been made to juxtapose related works, as in the paintings of the same dead heron by Alfred Sisley and Frédéric Bazille, other edifying contrasts have gone begging, like Van Gogh’s Still Life: Basket of Apples and Gauguin’s Still Life with Tahitian Oranges, which are together in the catalogue. In the end, you’re left to assemble your own show.

Which is not altogether a bad thing. I began mine by reminding myself that the French phrase for still life is nature morte, and that there’s a constant dialectic here between what was living and what is now dead except for the way it lives in our consciousness (of course, for a poet as attuned to the inner being of inanimate objects as, say, Rainer Maria Rilke, even a table or a pitcher is always alive). Consider the flowers: most are cut (that is, dying), yet when presented in great profusion — as in Bazille’s Flowers or Renoir’s Mixed Flowers in an Earthenware Pot — they convey the healthy glow of the living potted plants in Bazille’s Study of Flowers and Renoir’s Spring Flowers. It’s a version of trompe-l’œil — and perhaps that’s why I prefer the exquisite solitude of Manet’s memento mori flowers: Branch of White Peonies with Pruning Shears and Bouquet of Violets and Two Roses on a Tablecloth, beauty that, like Keats’s Grecian urn, is frozen in art but not in life. Even when Manet composes flowers, as in Moss Roses in a Vase, he undercuts the illusion — in this case it’s the hourglass vase that reminds us time is running out on these roses. His only peer — in this show at least — is Van Gogh, whose 1890 Roses, like virtually all his late work, seems to anticipate Einstein’s exploration of the relationship between time and space. Vincent’s letters reveal that these roses have faded: they were originally pink. Hard to imagine that this white, refulgent in its superabundance of light (don’t be misled by the dull catalogue reproduction — Van Gogh simply does not reproduce), isn’t better. Then again, Vincent was a genius and I’m not.

Fruit raises different questions: if we didn’t pick and eat it, wouldn’t it just wither? It’s hard to think of the juicy examples in Monet’s Jar of Peaches (a glass jar in which the fruit glistens in its liquid) or Henri Fantin-Latour’s Peaches or Gustave Caillebotte’s Fruit Displayed on a Stand as anything but vibrant and pulsing. The rotting specimens in Gustave Courbet’s Still Life: Fruit, on the other hand, remind us that with the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge comes death. Courbet’s painting has, for me, a grungy self-pity about it; the Dutch still-life painters of the 17th century (Willem Heda and Pieter Claesz. in Vermeer mode, or better yet the still-life details from Vermeer’s figure paintings) made a classier job of it.

Vegetables are an altogether humbler subject, but Manet’s A Bunch of Asparagus raises the bar with its oversized depiction of purple-tipped uncooked white asparagus; Susan Behrends Frank’s catalogue note recalls Proust’s ecstatic description and asks whether Manet’s heroic portrait mightn’t also bespeak a sense of humor. Renoir’s Onions rises to Manet’s level: the orangy ambiance and vibrating background convey the onion’s tangy sweetness. I’ve always thought there were at most a dozen first-rate Renoirs; Onions prompted me to make it a baker’s dozen.

The numerous depictions of dead birds (Monet’s Pheasants and Plovers, Caillebotte’s Game Birds and Lemons) and fish (Bazille’s Still Life with Fish) remind us that 19th-century Europeans confronted the reality of turning God’s creatures into sustenance in a way that our American McDonald’s culture is spared. Perhaps there’s a greater challenge in bringing to life objects that (pace Rilke) were never alive. In its dark dinginess, Van Gogh’s Three Pairs of Shoes raises questions most of us would like to avoid. Are the owners of these boots — one of which is tumbled upside-down — too besotted and debauched to care? Or are they too poor? It’s eerie how Vincent anticipates Primo Levi’s " Death begins with the shoes. " Edgar Degas sets himself an easier task in The Millinery Shop by including a figure, a seated woman who’s holding up one expensive hat even as she’s surrounded by others. There’s some doubt as to her identity: customer, shop owner, or shop girl? Her plain dress suggests this last, as does the way Degas’s composition has one hat appear to be almost but never quite sitting on her head — as if to predict that she’ll never be able to afford such a luxury.

" Impressionist Still Life " climaxes not in the resolution of its theme but in the identification of its tutelary god. The last room is given over mostly (why not entirely?) to works by Paul Cézanne — but even in the first room, Cézanne’s 1865 Still Life with Bread and Eggs elevates itself above the crowd, the meanest staples of life — bread, eggs, onions, a wineglass, and Paul’s trademark white tablecloth — set against the black uncertainty that we exit and re-enter. Decades later, Cézanne has arrived at an anticipatory combination of Gauguin’s color, Giorgio Morandi’s form, and a compositional instability that would do credit to Robert Wiene, but the white tablecloth is still omnipresent (my Phoenix colleague Lloyd Schwartz has suggested that inverted it turns into Mont Sainte-Victoire; that never jumped out at me but perhaps it should), and he still makes most of this show look ordinary. The Kitchen Table may be composed out of mundane elements — table, tablecloth, basket, apples and pears, jugs and jars — but its planes, rising from lower left to upper right, seem to have us climbing mountain ridges. And under the now magical tablecloth, the table changes perspective, being tilted far more on the left than it is on the right. Balanced (don’t underestimate the stabilizing force of the large pear at the lower right) and yet unbalanced, Cézanne’s painting turns still life into a personal depiction of the universe and our ambivalent place in it — to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, he realizes the intersection of the animate with the inanimate.

Still Life with a Ginger Jar and Eggplants describes a still more complex weltanschauung. The title is deceptive: Cézanne has also included fruit, a wine bottle, a glazed jar, and a large melon. The three eggplants, which hang from a branch at the upper right, are subsumed into composition, which is poised uneasily on a couple of patterned cloths whose folds raise queasy questions about the shape of the universe. The fruit, one lemon excepted (just as in the MFA’s Fruit and Jug on a Table), is arranged on a platter that’s angled to slide right out of the picture frame; it gets no help from the inevitable white tablecloth underneath. Both prominent, the glazed jar and melon seem to be asking why they’re not part of the title. Cézanne’s exploration of mass and gravity and volume and two-dimensional representation bursts off the canvas, and he hasn’t even got round to including the human element.

He does in the three works that conclude " Impressionist Still Life, " all of which depict human skulls. It’s the genre’s most charged representation of life that no longer is, the remains of what used to be as vital and endearing as Degas’s milliner-shop girl. Unlike the fish and the birds we see here, Cézanne’s skulls are reduced to the lowest common denominator: we’ll never know who they were. But are they still alive? Only a Cézanne could pose that simple question.

Issue Date: March 7-14, 2002
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