High up on the wall in the first room of the Tate Modern’s blockbuster Cézanne exhibition, there was a quote from the revered postimpressionist: “With an apple, I shall astonish Paris.” To which, surely, the only response is: “OK mate. Nobody has ever been astonished by an apple. Least of all Parisians, who tend to greet most things with a Gallic shrug.”
There is no doubt that Cézanne was extremely influential and did, indeed, astonish. The very fact a 19th-century artist was being shown at the Tate’s modern arm is down to his avant garde impact on cubism and beyond. And the exhibition, which has just closed, was striking for its comprehensive exploration of the painter’s masterly career – from early self-portraiture to the quasi-baroque and Romantic stylings of The Eternal Feminine, from nude bathers to gorgeous renderings of seas, forests and his beloved Mont Sainte-Victoire. But there were also – over and over, gluttonously – apples.
Cézanne created more than 270 works of apples. Among them the Ronseal-titled Apples (1878); Still Life with Apples (1890); Still Life with Apples – again (1894); The Basket of Apples (1893). And so on. Occasionally, he mixed it up, as with Still Life with Apples and Pears (1892) or Apples and Oranges (1900). But it’s too many apples.
In fairness, Cézanne is probably the greatest of all apple-depicters: the surface light he captures; the colour transitions as the fruit ripens then rots; the masterly suggestion one is about to roll off the table. He influenced and worked alongside other accomplished apple-botherers, such as Renoir and Monet and Manet (who called still life the “touchstone” of painting). But I’ll just say it: for the most part, still life is dull as hell.
This isn’t exactly a niche opinion – even in Cézanne’s time, still life was at the bottom of the hierarchy of subjects deemed worthy. Portraitists and landscape artists have almost always been held in much higher esteem. And to my mind, rightly so. Humans, nature: teeming with verve, vigour and vitality. But a vase? A candlestick? A jug? Cutlery, I ask you! Not so much.
Still life in art has existed throughout history. Ancient Egyptians daubed little paintings of their supper on cave walls and the inside of tombs, and I have seen up-close the surviving Roman frescoes of fruit in Pompeii. But still life came into its own during the Renaissance. The emergence of a wealthier middle class, and with it a focus on materialism, as well as a growth in secular subjects over the religious, contributed to its rise. The Dutch in particular were keen, along with the Italians and French. Jacopo de’ Barbari is often cited as the artist who kicked off the explosion of still life with his Still-Life with Partridge and Gauntlets (1504), and so we can place much of the blame with him.
There are canonical still lifes that I do adore. I mostly give a pass to flowers. I am not sure there is a better painter of flowers than Maria van Oosterwijck, the Dutch Golden Age artist whose use of chiaroscuro and vibrant colours produced blooms almost as stunning as the real thing. And I will allow Van Gogh’s sunflowers. I can appreciate, too, the texture and pattern in Maya Kopitseva’s kitchen-scapes.
I would not quibble with the impact or acuity of either Duchamp’s dadaist Fountain (1917) or Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962). Or there’s Harold E Edgerton AKA Papa Flash, the MIT professor and inventor of the electronic flash, whose visceral 1964 photograph Bullet through Apple seems to stop time, and was a demonstration of advances in photographic technique and scientific understanding. (Due to an unshakeable desire to decorate each room in my home appositely – bathroom, kitchen etc – I own prints of all of the above.) I marvel at the supreme beauty and detail of a Qing dynasty vase as much as the next person, and I love Martin Parr’s glorious spillage of baked beans over toast against a traditional red-and-white checked tablecloth.
But I’m afraid there’s only so much I can learn from, say, an extinguished candle or decaying fruit. The symbolism of vanitas paintings is heavy; their memento mori a comment on mortality. It’s just that skulls and hourglasses are unsubtle, while I’m not sure a banana turning brown is synonymous of the end of a human life. A banana has not fallen in love with other fruits; experienced joy or loss. A banana doesn’t know what a sunset is. A banana hasn’t got to age 33 and had an existential crisis (hi!). For more insightful elucidation on death, I would recommend Daphne Todd’s haunting 2010 portrait of her deceased mother, or maybe then-journalism student Therese Frare’s David Kirby on His Deathbed (1990), which did so much to combat ignorance and prejudice during the Aids crisis.
I love art. I am a frequent visitor to galleries and museums. I also paint and draw and take photographs. I doodled endlessly as a youngster, but art lessons at school weren’t exactly thrilling, cracking open pastels and being made to sketch an orange the teacher had bought from Tesco that morning. There was also something incongruous about 12-year-olds drawing wine bottles, and something anachronistic about copying candlesticks in the 00s.
It makes sense, however, that children would learn to draw and paint via still life. It is a useful genre for artists of all ages to play and experiment with when it comes to form and colour and perspective (which is partly why Cézanne did so much of it), but it does not give the sense of satisfaction that capturing a human expression does, or beneath it – without wanting to sound like the most pretentious individual in the world – a person’s essence. It can’t inspire the feeling of summer warmth on your skin when looking at sunlight glinting on the surface of seas; or evoke the crunch of leaves and twigs underfoot in the woods; or capture the contrasting human emotions – stress, nonchalance, concentration, resignation – of students before an exam.
One might argue that part of the quotidian nature of still life is the point. But if still life is a reflection of how we live, how come most contemporary still life says nothing of how we live now? It comes close to counterfactual. A friend had a print framed for me, which I adore. It’s a photograph that was included in a book of hers, and in its Romantic candlelight and flowers it is positively Velázquez-esque. But I love it precisely because its echo of the past is instinctual and organic, unintentional rather than parody. Many artists, however, are still producing jugs and bowls of fruit, when the remnants of Deliveroo packaging, or perhaps an air fryer, might be more verisimilitudinous.
To their credit, there are artists producing such work. Michael Craig-Martin, the Irish-born artist, began documenting shifting consumer culture in the 1970s, focusing on objects that define each era or capture the zeitgeist. His current subjects include headphones, coffee cups and debit cards; and his recent show in Amsterdam included renderings of pandemic staples: face masks, sanitiser bottles, and laptops. He has created a visual vocabulary of the times, and the vivid and contrasting colours he works with inject a sense of fun into the everyday (his bananas are blue). As well as his paintings (a mashup of computerised drawing and acrylics on aluminium), Craig-Martin also creates oversized sculptures, making the minutiae of our lives large.
The other day I was scrolling Instagram (the iPhone is another Craig-Martin subject) and came across a painting by Flo Perry of a set of house keys hanging on a hook above the kind of entry phone ubiquitous in modern blocks of flats. To me, it nods – wittingly or not – on the macro level, towards the density and development of high-rises, in this era of housing shortages and rentals and shared ownership. Those entry phones are a signifier of millennial lives. And, more personally, where does the flat occupier go every time they grab those keys and open the door? Who are they buzzing in? What does the rest of their home look like? I’m a big fan, too, of Lucy Sparrow’s witty felt iterations of corner shop and pharmacy products, from antidepressants to chocolate bars to pregnancy tests to bottles of ketchup.
During the pandemic, there was an organic movement in creating still life compositions. Many were created by individuals who had never before picked up a pencil or paintbrush or camera. There was even an Instagram hashtag: #stayhomestilllives, a play on the UK government slogan “stay home, save lives”. This communal, creative coming together was uplifting. My still life scepticism softened. Then I got tired of upside-down mugs balancing on colanders, and the world opened up again.
For most of us, that is. For some, it did not. Which is why the still life work of inmates at Pentonville prison art club in London is instructive. You might say the reason for so much still life in the past was down to similarly limited options of subject matter. But I’m afraid that just doesn’t wash when Turner was out there literally painting up a storm. Or Schiele was sketching everyone masturbating (and, indeed, the Romans had their friskier frescoes). Basically, what I’m saying is: there is absolutely no excuse for the output of Morandi.
I have tried, I really have. But I just don’t think a plate on a tablecloth is ever going to speak to me. I’ve cocked my ear, I’ve listened hard. Nothing but the echo of a gallery attendant’s steps going from room to room, and me staring at grapes.
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