Ghosts at the Table

Abstract

Traditional still life is easy to recognize. It is the painting of things. The objects are usually small and most often set out on a table. The things are not outdoors but inside a house, and the represented space is not deep but shallow, which makes the spectator feel close to them. Still life does not include people. It implies human presence but doesn’t show the living human form. Painting the inanimate world is different from painting people or nature for the simple reason that paintings, like things, are still. Landscapes may depict storms at sea or a gentle breeze blowing across a meadow, but the paint is motionless. Portraits may imply the movement of a hand, the beginning of a smile, but the human beings on the canvas are stopped in that instant forever. Like all mimetic painting, traditional still life is in the business of illusion. Only a mad person would reach out to take a grape from a Chardin canvas in order to eat it, and yet the fact is that the painting of a table laid for dinner, flat as it is, bears a resemblance to the reality of the things it refers to by virtue of its deadness. The French nature morte bears this aspect of still life in its name. The genre as a whole exists within the human relation to things—essentially a relation between what is living and what is dead.