Garden with Sunflowers,” 1887. For the sake of keeping the peace, let’s just agree that this is a still life. In any rate… it is a prime example to illustrate a topic that Susan Bingham and I have been having over the nature and import of still lifes and their marginal placement in the history of art. Most will agree that a narrative painting, or an historia, as it is traditionally called, be it by Titian, Vermeer, Velasquez, Poussin, or Turner, tells a story from tradition be it historical, religious, classical, or invenzione, another historical usage of the word. Even the works of Manet, Cezanne, Degas, or Seurat, even Picasso, had narrative aspects, until the non-objective aspects of painting reduced materiality, but painting can still be read today in a narrative context today, from landscape, to traditional naturalism, to the most forward abstraction, for narrative content. There is one type of painting that has always defied the narrative aspect. This is the “still life.” The still life is a moment in time, not transient, not transitory, not temporal, but a moment “frozen in time.” I like to use the phraseology for still life, “distilled life.” This can be seen clearly in this frozen moment by Vincent. So much of life has been distilled, condensed, the essence of so much of life’s vitality has been distilled and reduced in this one finite moment. This moment, as it has been captured in its essence and vitality, representational of all of life. As still life is most often flowers, from the Dutch tradition, capturing the essence of life in full fecundity, at its richest, at its fullest, in full bloom, this definitive moment that refuses to budge in its temporal being, represents life at its full fecundity, at its richest, at its fullest, in full bloom. At the teeming of existence. At the epicenter of reality. For Vincent the sunflower, and the sun itself, was a symbol of life itself, in its zenith, it represented the bounty life had to offer. One can see that in the abundance of still lifes of sunflowers Vincent painted, he was distilling life at its zenith, at its most vital essence, he was celebrating life and celebrating existence and celebrating reality. Although his own might have been one of much suffering, the humanist that Vincent was transcended that and painted what he knew and could see, but could barely touch, and these distilled lives are the greatest manifestations of this beauty and this lust for living, dispute his own limitations.
Posted on: Tue, 29 Jul 2014 13:19:07 +0000
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