Still Life at the Pallant House Gallery

 

Ethel Walker, Flower Piece no 4 c1930

The Shape of Things is the title for this charming exhibition of still life by British artists from around 1900 to the present day. Like many of the best Pallant House exhibitions, it makes considerable use of the remarkable Pallant House permanent collection, based around Nash, Nicholson, Bloomsbury, Ravilious, and a few others. Curator Simon Martin describes it (in the catalogue on page 12) with just a touch of exaggeration as “a history of modern and contemporary British art through still life”. It comprises around 150 works, of which perhaps a third are by living artists, a very healthy proportion. Commendable also was the complementary exhibition at the Pallant, of works by members of the local community, called Significant Objects, objects that have a value to the creator.

Walking around the show, I realised that still life is a term we often use but without always thinking about what it means. Several of the works in this show didn’t look like still life to me. So here is a definition – and let’s see what fits, and what doesn’t:

Still life: a genre of representational art of motionless objects, usually arranged, such as flowers or fruit, but not including the human figure. It is distinct from landscape painting, where the artist depicts a view of what they see, and from botanical illustration, which depicts for information and education, even though many early still life works are astonishing for their verisimilitude and detail.

Although still life, by this definition, has existed since earliest times, it emerged in Western art as a genre in the Low Countries during the 16th and 17th centuries. Within the overall grouping of still life there have been popular subjects and topics, for example, depictions of flowers, dead animals and game, bowls of fruit, Vanitas (expressing the vanity of human desires) and Memento Mori (reminder of death).

Still life was traditionally considered “low” art, depicting the everyday, contrasted with “high” art (of heroes and saints), but has always been popular. Some of the greatest 19th- and 20th-century artists have produced still life, including Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Matisse.

That definition enabled me to raise a few questions – for example, is there anything distinctly British about still life? The catalogue states explicitly that still life was not a British invention, and crosses many national boundaries. There is nothing specifically British about a bowl of fruit.

Yet the Pallant House director, Simon Martin, confidently and curiously asserts that the still life genre “can be seen as a manifestation of Britain’s status as a former maritime power, and the long legacy of empire” [p8]. I can read lots of things into still life, but I hadn’t expected that interpretation. His observation, or justification, is that many artists who carried out still life painting were immigrants to the UK. His long list of first- or second-generation painters includes many from Europe, which seems to defeat his argument; all in all, I don’t think it is a very helpful way of looking at still life.

Works that don’t appear to me to be part of still life include Katie Paterson’s Ending, a dial of 100 different pigments, representing nothing; and the very prominent jars by Lindsey Mendick, covered in writhing creatures. I also felt the surrealist works with imaginary items fell outside the remit of still life. 

Sickert, Still Life on a Table, 1913

It doesn’t help to be too doctrinaire on this point. Sickert’s lovely Still Life on a Table has some figures in the background, but they don’t really affect the main still life in the foreground. 

Anwar Jalal Shemza, Still Life, 1957

Anwar Jalal Shemza’s Still Life, was remarkable – a rich mix of ochres, reds and blues.

But for me, the highlights of the show were some of the flower paintings, by Winifred Nicholson, Cedric Morris, and Ethel Walker. Flowers seem to bring out the best in some painters (Ben Nicholson’s son said very aptly that his father’s paintings of flowers in vases was all about the vase rather than the flowers), and it was thrilling to see the enthusiastic brush-strokes, rather than nit-picking attention to detail, in these works. Flowers full of life like these are a wonderful inspiration; they seem free of the heavy-handed use of the skull that was still continuing in the 20th-century, and which appeared to be a clumsy and outdated attempt to convey significance. Walker’s painting seems to proclaim, “Look at these flowers! Are they not magical?” For me, the best still lifes are unpretentious (and unportentous) examples of low, rather than high life, and all the better for it.