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Pallant House Gallery, Chichester
Until October 20
Damien Hirst is famously fascinated by death and decay. For him, they are inseparable from an affirmation of life, we understand in the Pallant’s major exhibition, the first of its kind, of more than 100 practitioners of British still life – or, as the French would say, “la nature morte”.
Hirst’s contribution is a scattering of butterflies against an unnaturally blue sky. The butterflies are at once a symbol of the beauty of life and its brevity and fragility – as they have been since the Dutch golden age of still life. Then the butterfly appeared, sometimes with wasps and flies alongside the bravura mounds of fruit and flowers, classically against a black backdrop.
The Pallant’s comprehensive, scholarly and disquieting exploration of British still life acknowledges its Dutch origins with works by Simon Verelst and Edwaert Collier, both of whom made their way to England in the late 17th-century around the time when the House of Orange’s ascendancy to the British throne cemented a rage for all things Dutch.
In Verelst’s “Roses, morning glory and a carnation on a marble ledge with some grapes”, the hovering butterfly is reflected in the shining skin of a grape in one of many virtuosic touches.
Collier’s “Veritas Still Life” is a more explicit juxtaposition of symbols of the worldliness of trade and exploration and reminders that it all ends in dust, summed up in the inscription “Vita Brevis Ars Longa” (life is short, art is long), which you could also read as the transcendence of art and by extension the artists.
Just as the artists play on the dramatic tension between life and death, joy and despair, beauty and horror, plants in full bloom and the seared edges of their leaves, the Pallant’s exhibition throughout relishes juxtaposition and contrast as still life becomes the medium to explore every anxiety or hope and its own works are set in contrast to the borrowed.
The truly British story begins, when conscious of the market for Dutch art, the three Smith brothers of Chichester, home to the Pallant, began to paint still life, becoming perhaps the first native British artists to do so.
Their art has, almost literally, a British flavour. The exhibition includes George Smith’s “Still Life with Joint of Beef on a Pewter Dish” and William Smith’s “Still Life with Grapes, Peaches and Plums”, which also includes the kind of cob nuts growing on the nearby Downs.
However proud the Dutch still life painters were, the form was long considered relatively lowly. As such it was open to women who were not allowed to paint from live nude models.
Mary Moser, daughter of the Swiss painter George Michael Moser, another migrant to 18th-century Britain, was, according to Germaine Greer, not only “the first significant British flower painter, she was also one of the best”. To prove the point, her “Summer Flowers on a Ledge” has been loaned to the Pallant by the Courtauld.
Leaping ahead to the 20th-century, the status of still life was transformed by the disruption of World War and the eruption of modernism that took still life to nightmarish, abstract and highly symbolic extremes. Its function to remind us life ends in death is at times overwhelming and when it is, we can turn to airy contrast or dark surrealism.
We veer between Winifred Nicholson’s cheerful, pastel “Vermilion and Mauve” and the bleakness of Paul Nash’s “Dead Spring”, depicting a desiccated pot plant by a window; and between the bracing, primary colours of Edward Wadsworth’s “Bright Intervals” and the unobtrusive tones of Walter Sickert’s “Mushrooms”.
Textures span the range from William Nicholson’s shiny and matt “The Silver Casket and Red Leather Box” to Harold Gilman’s “The Cup and Saucer” in which the crockery seems to flake with excess paint.
The mood shifts from contemplative to barbed and menacing as realism makes way for surrealism when even the most clear-sighted of artists found the need to take an oblique approach to the inhumanity of the so-called real world.
Eileen Agar’s “The Object Lesson” is a teasing collage that combines a wicker rack and a jointed lay figure, of the kind used by artists to study poses, holding a paintbrush whose end has been speared into a champagne cork given to her by Picasso.
After the surreal, comes the abstract. For instance, Barbara Hepworth’s “Conoid, Spere and Hollow” is wide open to interpretation, while Henry Moore “Elephant Skull” etching transforms a theoretically vast momento mori into something indeterminate.
In the later 20th-century, as the horror and austerity gave way to opulence, still life turned satirical. Hirst’s butterflies are light relief compared with the crowded excess of say John Bratby’s “Still Life with Chip Frier” or the deliberate ugliness of Peter Coker’s “Sunflowers” that almost parody van Gogh’s.
The ironies rumble on into the 21st-century as war never ceases to be a backdrop.
Mona Hatoum’s “Medical Cabinet”, filled with glass grenades, evokes the paradox of a society that should be curing people rather than making their lives more fragile than ever.
Today’s artists also find time for less obviously troubling reflection as they project their thoughts and cares on to more peaceful, though still unsettling objects.
Rachel Whiteread is represented by her pink hot water bottle “Torso” and ghostly bookshelves that tantalise with their absent titles, while Edmund de Waal’s “September Song” focuses us on the gold of the season as well as the looming emptiness.
The sheer inclusiveness could all feel random and confusing, but the Pallant, as always, manages to leave us with a sense of meaning and coherence, while denying us any simple conclusions.
Phoebe Cummings’ accompanying installation “I Hear Myself with My Throat”, which extrapolates from the stucco still life in a ceiling in the Pallant’s glorious old townhouse, sums up the brittle ongoingness of it all.
The Shape of Things: Still Life in Britain
Pallant House Gallery, Chichester
Until October 20
Damien Hirst is famously fascinated by death and decay. For him, they are inseparable from an affirmation of life, we understand in the Pallant’s major exhibition, the first of its kind, of more than 100 practitioners of British still life – or, as the French would say, “la nature morte”.
Hirst’s contribution is a scattering of butterflies against an unnaturally blue sky. The butterflies are at once a symbol of the beauty of life and its brevity and fragility – as they have been since the Dutch golden age of still life. Then the butterfly appeared, sometimes with wasps and flies alongside the bravura mounds of fruit and flowers, classically against a black backdrop.
The Pallant’s comprehensive, scholarly and disquieting exploration of British still life acknowledges its Dutch origins with works by Simon Verelst and Edwaert Collier, both of whom made their way to England in the late 17th-century around the time when the House of Orange’s ascendancy to the British throne cemented a rage for all things Dutch.
In Verelst’s “Roses, morning glory and a carnation on a marble ledge with some grapes”, the hovering butterfly is reflected in the shining skin of a grape in one of many virtuosic touches.
Collier’s “Veritas Still Life” is a more explicit juxtaposition of symbols of the worldliness of trade and exploration and reminders that it all ends in dust, summed up in the inscription “Vita Brevis Ars Longa” (life is short, art is long), which you could also read as the transcendence of art and by extension the artists.
Just as the artists play on the dramatic tension between life and death, joy and despair, beauty and horror, plants in full bloom and the seared edges of their leaves, the Pallant’s exhibition throughout relishes juxtaposition and contrast as still life becomes the medium to explore every anxiety or hope and its own works are set in contrast to the borrowed.
The truly British story begins, when conscious of the market for Dutch art, the three Smith brothers of Chichester, home to the Pallant, began to paint still life, becoming perhaps the first native British artists to do so.
Their art has, almost literally, a British flavour. The exhibition includes George Smith’s “Still Life with Joint of Beef on a Pewter Dish” and William Smith’s “Still Life with Grapes, Peaches and Plums”, which also includes the kind of cob nuts growing on the nearby Downs.
However proud the Dutch still life painters were, the form was long considered relatively lowly. As such it was open to women who were not allowed to paint from live nude models.
Mary Moser, daughter of the Swiss painter George Michael Moser, another migrant to 18th-century Britain, was, according to Germaine Greer, not only “the first significant British flower painter, she was also one of the best”. To prove the point, her “Summer Flowers on a Ledge” has been loaned to the Pallant by the Courtauld.
Leaping ahead to the 20th-century, the status of still life was transformed by the disruption of World War and the eruption of modernism that took still life to nightmarish, abstract and highly symbolic extremes. Its function to remind us life ends in death is at times overwhelming and when it is, we can turn to airy contrast or dark surrealism.
We veer between Winifred Nicholson’s cheerful, pastel “Vermilion and Mauve” and the bleakness of Paul Nash’s “Dead Spring”, depicting a desiccated pot plant by a window; and between the bracing, primary colours of Edward Wadsworth’s “Bright Intervals” and the unobtrusive tones of Walter Sickert’s “Mushrooms”.
Textures span the range from William Nicholson’s shiny and matt “The Silver Casket and Red Leather Box” to Harold Gilman’s “The Cup and Saucer” in which the crockery seems to flake with excess paint.
The mood shifts from contemplative to barbed and menacing as realism makes way for surrealism when even the most clear-sighted of artists found the need to take an oblique approach to the inhumanity of the so-called real world.
Eileen Agar’s “The Object Lesson” is a teasing collage that combines a wicker rack and a jointed lay figure, of the kind used by artists to study poses, holding a paintbrush whose end has been speared into a champagne cork given to her by Picasso.
After the surreal, comes the abstract. For instance, Barbara Hepworth’s “Conoid, Spere and Hollow” is wide open to interpretation, while Henry Moore “Elephant Skull” etching transforms a theoretically vast momento mori into something indeterminate.
In the later 20th-century, as the horror and austerity gave way to opulence, still life turned satirical. Hirst’s butterflies are light relief compared with the crowded excess of say John Bratby’s “Still Life with Chip Frier” or the deliberate ugliness of Peter Coker’s “Sunflowers” that almost parody van Gogh’s.
The ironies rumble on into the 21st-century as war never ceases to be a backdrop.
Mona Hatoum’s “Medical Cabinet”, filled with glass grenades, evokes the paradox of a society that should be curing people rather than making their lives more fragile than ever.
Today’s artists also find time for less obviously troubling reflection as they project their thoughts and cares on to more peaceful, though still unsettling objects.
Rachel Whiteread is represented by her pink hot water bottle “Torso” and ghostly bookshelves that tantalise with their absent titles, while Edmund de Waal’s “September Song” focuses us on the gold of the season as well as the looming emptiness.
The sheer inclusiveness could all feel random and confusing, but the Pallant, as always, manages to leave us with a sense of meaning and coherence, while denying us any simple conclusions.
Phoebe Cummings’ accompanying installation “I Hear Myself with My Throat”, which extrapolates from the stucco still life in a ceiling in the Pallant’s glorious old townhouse, sums up the brittle ongoingness of it all.
Barbara Lewis © 2024.
By Barbara Lewis • art, exhibitions, painting, year 2024 • Tags: art, Barbara Lewis, exhibitions, painting