In the Presence of Things: Four Centuries of European Still-life Painting

The exhibition which this catalogue accompanies is the second part of a story which began with last year's show at the Gulbenkian, 'In the Presence of Things: Four Centuries of European Still-Life Painting'. The latter traced the evolution in Europe of the type of picture now known as the still life, from its beginnings in the seventeenth century over a chronological span of two centuries. It illustrated the wide range of artistic approaches to the abiding themes of still-life painting — the fruit piece, the game piece, kitchen and banquet still lifes, the flower painting, and the trompe l'oeil — as well as the varying cultural and social significance of such arrangements of foodstuffs, objects and commodities. The exhibition concentrated on the artistic motivations of painters and particularly the ways in which they were inspired by the idea of the still life as an 'imitation of nature'. Therefore, a generous selection of works demonstrated the artifice and virtuosity of seventeenth-century painters in response to this fundamental aesthetic challenge. The exhibition ended at a crossroads, exemplified by the paintings of Luiz Melendez, who copied arrangements of objects on tabletops before him with obsessive accuracy, and the two artists who ultimately took the still life into new expressive directions, Chardin and Goya. The present exhibition picks up the story of still life in nineteenth-century France, showing the revival of interest in the genre among avant-garde painters who responded to artistic traditions. However, the themes that are played out in the different sections of the show — including the breadth and complexity of ideas associated with the still life, its new challenges and excitements, and the stresses placed on this very category of art itself — take the visitor far away from the artistic world described in the first part. The reason for this is to be seen in the manifold aspects of the cultural context explored here; modernity.