October 31, 1999-January 9, 2000

"Exciting...succumb to its magic." --The New York Times

Only U.S. showing.
Sponsored by National City.

Overview
Curator's Article
What is a still life?
Catalogue
Recorded Tour
Special Programs
Highlights

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Overview

In the 17th century tens of thousands of still lifes were produced - paintings on canvas, sheets of copper and wood panels - all lovingly created and eagerly purchased. The exhibition Still-Life Paintings from the Netherlands, 1550-1720, on view in the United States exclusively at the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA), surveys the entire golden age of this popular genre for the first time. Never has an exhibition drawn together 70 of the finest still lifes in all their variety: vibrant flowers, tantalizing fruits, sumptuous banquets, laden market tables or desks, and the visual trickery of paintings known as trompe l'oeil ("fool the eye"). Artists represented include Rembrandt and nearly 50 of the countless lesser-known, gifted men and women whose works were once so sought after. The exhibition draws significantly from the collections of the CMA and the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. The National Gallery in London, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Mauritshuis in the Hague are among the 53 other museums and private collections throughout northern Europe and North America that are lending works to the show.

Still-Life Paintings opens here on Sunday, Oct. 31, 1999, and remains on view through the holidays until Jan. 9, 2000. Its only other venue has been the Rijksmuseum (through Sept. 19, 1999), which co-organized the show with the CMA and hosted news media from 16 nations at its June 1999 opening. The Cleveland showing of the exhibition is sponsored by National City Bank. Research and planning initiatives were supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency. The exhibition is also supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

Admission is free to the exhibition in Cleveland and to most of the special programs complementing it. A 40-minute recorded tour narrated by CMA Acting Director Kate M. Sellers will be available for $4.

"No one should miss such a rare opportunity to see these gorgeous paintings from the golden age of Dutch art," says Ms. Sellers. "The still life tradition is one of the greatest contributions of that culture to the history of art, with an amazing number of talented masters, and this show gathers together some of the best works they ever produced. Be they of banquets or books, these paintings are so easy to look at, so wonderful to linger over. Cleveland's visitors will also see in our newly acquired masterpiece by Amsterdam painter Frans Hals - contemporary with many of these still lifes - a great portrait of just the sort of successful Dutch merchant who was an eager customer of these artists."

Diane De Grazia, The Clara T. Rankin Chief Curator and Curator of Paintings and Drawings at CMA, is overseeing the exhibition in Cleveland. The organizing curators and catalogue co-authors were Wouter Kloek and Alan Chong. Wouter Kloek is the Head of the Department of Painting at the Rijksmuseum. Alan Chong, former Associate Curator of Paintings at the CMA, is now Curator of Collections at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

Says Dr. De Grazia: "Most people, when someone mentions the term 'still life,' think of fruit or flowers, like van Gogh's sunflowers or Cézanne's apples or similarly beloved subjects made so popular by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists around the last turn of the century. Working on this Still-Life Paintings show, even I have been surprised by the incredible variety of subjects and styles, not to mention the virtuoso ability of so many painters in that time and place to recreate their subjects with such startling realism in paint on flat surfaces. Wouter and Alan are to be congratulated for having secured the absolute cream of the crop for this exhibition - the most intricate, the most monumental, and the most beautifully preserved, from the most distinguished collections."

"Still life," from the Dutch stilleven, essentially means "not moving materials." This term for the art of painting inanimate objects did not come into use until late in the 17^th century when the genre was well established.

Many people assume that painters have explored these subjects throughout Western art history, because of the lasting appeal of some of the pictures. In fact, although still-life subjects appear in ancient art, for centuries thereafter they mostly played minor roles (sometimes symbolic) in larger compositions in the then-acceptable and desirable categories of religious, historical, mythological, or portrait paintings.

The works of Netherlandish still-life artists continue to be internationally admired as unrivalled achievements in this genre in Western art because of their rendering of materials (sometimes in near-microscopic detail), the subtlety of their compositions, and their feats of perspective.

We see the very beginnings of still life's independence in the oldest works on view, and its flourishing for a little over a century in Northern Europe as the exhibition evolves.

During the 16^th and 17^th centuries the Netherlands (modern-day countries of Belgium and the Netherlands) became the richest and most powerful nation in the Western world. With an economy based on international trade, the resulting prosperity in the Netherlands was distributed among a broad segment of society, enabling the middle class to acquire works of art as had only previously been possible for very wealthy individuals and institutions. While the burghers (wealthy and middle-class urban citizens) of the Netherlands collected all kinds of art ranging from Oriental carpets to fine silver and Chinese pottery, among the most popular acquisitions were paintings. In this broadened art market, Netherlandish artists began to move away from traditional subjects to paint landscapes, still lifes, and scenes of everyday urban and country life.

Still-life paintings depicting panoplies of exotic and everyday objects were particularly popular, and the standard of Netherlandish still lifes of the 17th century is unparalleled. The extraordinary quality declined soon thereafter, and, although superb still lifes have been painted elsewhere since then, the almost magical spell cast by the finest of the Netherlandish works of 1550 to 1720 was never equalled.

The earliest of these are represented in this exhibition by the work of pioneering painters Pieter Aertsen and his nephew and student, Joachim Beuckelaer (catalogue numbers 1 and 2). They are market and kitchen scenes filled with meat, fish, vegetables, and fruit. Biblical characters - the former stars of great paintings - have been reduced to minor roles in the backgrounds. The Aertsen painting, dated 1551, was unknown for centuries until its purchase at auction in 1993 by the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh. At 5-1/2 feet wide, the painting's freshly butchered animals and other familiar foods are practically life size, cropped into the edges of the painting to make viewers feel they are virtually in the scene.

A span of over 40 years separates these early works from the next-earliest on view in the exhibition's first room, CMA's Flowers in a Glass by Ambrosius Bosschaert (cat. 5, from 1606), one of the first artists to concentrate on flowers as subjects. Painted in oil on copper rather than on canvas, the blossoms, butterflies, and snails have a particularly luminous, jewel-like quality.

The still life in the Northern and Southern Netherlands had now become a legitimate separate genre and other artists also began to specialize. For example, Floris van Dijck excelled at cheeses (cat. 10, Rijksmuseum) and Willem Heda, at silver (cat. 21, from a private collection, and cat. 22, Staatliches Museum Schwerin).

Clara Peeters, one of three women represented in the exhibition, painted a table laid with assorted cheeses and butter (cat. 9, Richard Green, London). Peeters used tactics much appreciated by her buyers to mesh her own identity and that of her painting. She self-consciously included, perched on the table's edge, a distinctive knife engraved with her name (possibly her own wedding or betrothal gift) and painted a diminutive reflection of herself in the polished metal lid of a ceramic pitcher.

Besides the artists who concentrated entirely on the genre, there were others who only rarely produced still lifes. Examples of such works in the exhibition include a mysterious painting of wine vessels, a horse bridle, and a cautionary musical inscription, called Allegory of Temperance (cat. 11, Rijksmuseum). This is the only surviving picture by Johannes Torrentius, who, ironically, was once imprisoned on charges of heresy and immorality. Initials branded on the back of the canvas indicate it was once in the possession of the avid art collector, King Charles I of England, who engineered Torrentius' release so that he could continue to paint.

Rembrandt's only still-life painting, Dead Peafowl (cat. 40, Rijksmuseum), is also somewhat haunting. The artist focused on two dead peahens, displayed in a stark, stone interior. One hangs by its legs as was the culinary custom with game to drain the blood and tenderize the tougher meat. The bird's splendid feathered wings fall open to view, while in the background an anachronistically dressed little girl - like a reminder of simpler times in the medieval world - quietly observes through an open window.

A notable and amusing type of still life is the visually arresting trompe l'oeil. The depictions of letter racks by Samuel van Hoogstraten (cat. 53, Ronald and Leah Lenney) are so lifelike that they almost invite the viewer to take hold of a letter. Similarly, in a painting by Cornelis Brize, the documents from the room of the Treasurer-General in the Amsterdam Town Hall look almost tangible (cat. 55, Amsterdams Historisch Museum, on loan to the Royal Palace, Amsterdam).

With the freedom that came with composing their own subjects, still life painters focused their ambitions on perfectly capturing such nuances as the whitish gray of silver and the bluish gray of pewter, or the golds of wicker baskets and gilded goblets. They frequently incorporated other extraordinary artistic challenges in their displays - groups of different ceramics with their distinctive textures, a utensil left dangling precariously on the edge of a table as though someone has just left his place. They became wizards at conveying perspective, and master technicians applying paint in multiple layers of glazes that still capture light like a lens, creating images that have tremendous depth and glow with color.

A particularly theatrical painting is A Richly Laid Table with Parrots by Jan Davidsz de Heem. It is part of the huge art collection amassed in this country in this century by John Ringling of circus fame (cat. 32, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota). The looks passing between the birds, one of which has grabbed in its beak a piece of fruit, enliven this scene. The artist clearly meant to convey the good life, with its trappings of gold and silver and velvet accessories and plates of half-eaten gourmet treats carelessly stacked on each other.

Many times these paintings were created for sheer visual delight, or for luxurious impact. The actual cost (to a 17^th-century collector) of a decorative metal beaker or a group of rare tulip bulbs would have far exceeded the cost of most paintings depicting laid tables or flower arrangements. In addition to these pleasures, however, many still lifes convey moral or allegorical messages - some more clearly than others to modern eyes.

The temporal, ephemeral nature of this life is an idea that played a significant role for still life painters. Paintings of books, skulls, and hourglasses alluded to the triumph of study and knowledge as well as the passing of time. One especially engaging and complex picture is by David Bailly (cat. 38, Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden). Here a self-portrait of the youthful artist gazes prominently at the viewer, holding another self-portrait at middle age. A curled-up sheet of paper in the lower right corner bears not only the artist's signature but also the well-known passage from Ecclesiastes, "Vanity of vanities, everything is vanity."

For over a quarter of a century, Pieter Claesz repeatedly painted a human skull from his collection of objects, including it in two paintings on view in this exhibition (cat. 15, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and cat. 16, from a European private collection). In both, the snaggle-toothed skull is perched atop tattered books, next to just-snuffed oil lamps, broadly hinting that earthly matter goes up in smoke with the passing of time.

Many paintings sang the praises of Dutch prosperity in the 17th century, featuring exotic fruits, flowers, and fabrics, imported or documented by the East India Company, or souvenir seashells from distant oceans brought back on trading ships. Some cast the spotlight on the more humble foundations of the national economy - herring, bread, and beer. Among these are Pieter Claesz's Herring with a Glass of Beer and a Roll (cat. 17, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam) and Praise of Pickled Herring by Joseph de Bray (cat. 57, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden). Certain juxtapositions in paintings simply come straight out of 17th-century recipe and diet books: olives must be eaten with cheese, peaches with red wine.

Such artists as Jan Breughel (son of Pieter, the famous "Peasant Painter") won over the royal houses of Europe with paintings of delicate bouquets composed of flowers imported from around the world. As the catalogue authors note in their description of Breughel's Flowers in a Chinese Porcelain Vase (cat. 3, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), such paintings "were meant as an enduring monument, rather than as a dour reminder of fleeting pleasures." The authors continue, quoting Breughel patron Cardinal Federico Borromeo of Milan, who reflected that "when winter encumbers and restricts everything with ice," he could still enjoy the colors of painted flowers, which were "very stable and endurable," as well as compelling evidence of God's bounty to humankind.

The exhibition proceeds roughly along thematic and chronological lines, concluding with such seductive, early-18^th-century works as Jan van Huysum's Vase of Flowers on a Garden Ledge (cat. 78, French & Company, Inc., New York). Included among its innumerable seemingly swaying, dew-laden blossoms and its veritable army of butterflies and other insects is a rare type of cabbage rose that was a particular favorite of the artist, and was ultimately named for him (Rosa huysumiana).

Surrounded by such masterpieces, co-curator Dr. Kloek mused that these artists tried to outdo each other for more than a century - then vanished - and none of the hundreds of painters who have come to the Rijksmuseum aspiring to match their achievements has even come close.

A fully illustrated catalogue of the exhibition is available in Dutch and English. The CMA's delicate Gooseberries, by Adriaen Coorte, graces its cover (cat. 75). It costs $39.95 (paperbound) or $49.95 (clothbound) at the CMA stores. It contains comprehensive entries on all the works on view as well as a half-dozen essays on Dutch and Flemish still-life painting.

To enhance the visitor's experience for the exhibition, the CMA is offering a random access audio tour for Still-Life Paintings with the free bonus of the Sight & Sound audio tour of the CMA's permanent collection. This is the first time that the museum is offering an audio tour for a free exhibition, and the first time it's being offered with the Sight & Sound tour. William Prenevost, senior officer for external affairs, says, "Since we made the switch from the linear tour on audio cassettes to the random access tour on CD players, the tours have received exceptionally high praise from our visitors. Thanks to a special arrangement with Antenna Audio who produces our audio tours, we are able to offer an audio tour for this free exhibition when normally the costs would prohibit it." The Still-Life Paintings and Sight & Sound audio tour combination is only $4 for the general public and $3 for CMA members.

Curator of contemporary art and photography Tom Hinson has organized the exhibition Janna Dekker and Jan van Leeuwen Photographs: Contemporary Dutch Still Lifes to show how two modern artists treat this time-honored theme (Oct. 23, 1999-Jan. 12, 2000).

Special Programs

Two concerts of period music in CMA's acoustically alive Indoor Garden Court, plus a harpsichord and organ recital in Gartner Auditorium, will round out the visitor's experience of Dutch and Flemish arts of the 17^th century. A guest lecture series will include Arthur Wheelock, renowned curator of Northern Baroque paintings at Washington's National Gallery of Art, as well as highlight one of three female artists in the exhibition, Rachel Ruysch, in a talk by John Carroll University's Marianne Berardi. All events are free except a sure-to-be-popular flower arranging demonstration inspired by works in the exhibition, led by CMA's education staff and Womens Council flower designers ($7, free to CMA members). See enclosed release describing these and other programs.

The CMA is regarded world-wide for the superb quality of its comprehensive collection, from its new Egyptian galleries (opening Sept. 1999) to its acclaimed Armor Court, from renowned Old Master paintings to Impressionist masterpieces. Its Asian and pre-Columbian collections are among the finest in North America. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays, plus Wednesday and Friday evenings until 9 p.m.; closed Thanksgiving Day, Dec. 25, and Jan. 1.

After the Still-Life Paintings exhibition, shows planned for 2000 and 2001 include ancient treasures, Impressionist portraits, 20^th-century design, and Picasso paintings. For more information, call 1-888-CMA-0033 or (216) 421-7350, or check this web site.

Promotional support for Still-Life Paintings is provided by Avenues Magazine and WCLV 95/5.