The Shape of Things: the exhibition and the curators

 

Poppy Jones Water Glass and Thistle (2024)

There seem to be two or more exhibitions taking place at the Pallant House Gallery exhibition of modern British still life art. On the one hand, a presentation of the quintessential still life genre, and how it has survived and been constantly refreshed through wars, artistic movements, and changing fashions. On the other hand, there is a somewhat frantic effort by the curators, the authors of the catalogue (The Shape of Things, Pallant House Gallery, 2024) to drag the show towards displaying the history of the last hundred years of art in Britain, almost as if still life in itself were not sufficient. Linked to this is a selection of works that aim to shock, deceive or fool us. Typical of this approach is Jane Simpson’s Our Distant Relatives, a Morandi-like assembly of what looks like porcelain vases and containers, except that they are made out of rubber rather than porcelain. You can’t see this from the objects displayed, and since we can’t touch the objects, we have no idea what they are made of; the joke is rather wasted on us. What’s the point? On the subject of things that can’t be seen, “Fergusson’s still lifes often had strong sexual overtones: other examples of his blue lamp still lifes include a small pink box … which is said to have contained Fergusson’s condoms.” This is a reference to something not visible in a painting not displayed at the exhibition.

To be brutal, the show is not sufficient even at showing the classical still life tradition and how it continued into the 20th century. Cezanne is described in the catalogue as ““arguably the father of modern still life” – so why not include anything by Cezanne in this show? He painted over 200 still lifes, so there are plenty to choose from. He wasn’t British, but does it matter? Or do we need to draw a line around Britain, and only include artists who practised here?

The quiet magic of still life is perhaps insufficient for the curators, but to be fair, the artists themselves were frequently happy to condemn much of the art around them. Paul Nash, in 1931, wrote “The tyrannical reign of Nature Morte is, at last, over. Apples have had their day”. But he didn’t have any coherent description of an alternative; he called for two seemingly contradictory ideas in art, first, intensity of design, but second, “Juxtaposition of paraphernalia”. The Smithsons in 1956 described the Pop Art of their generation as “the equivalent of the Dutch fruit and flower arrangement, the pictures of the second rank of all Renaissance schools … “. There are many dreary fruit and flower paintings, but this exhibition shows some examples of what could be done with these subjects. They aren’t all dreary.

Similarly, the curators are not sparing in their condemnation of much of this show. Describing the work of Bawden, Cedric Morris and Frances Hodgkins, they state “these works became commodities in themselves and took their place on the walls of fashionable society homes, becoming, in the words of the critic R H Wilenski, “wall furniture”. Well, if it were wall furniture, we wouldn’t be looking at it with such interest today.

 

More questionable still is when the curators going off in their own directions, not always related to the work. Describing still life in the 1930s, the writers come up with a gloriously ungrammatical claim: “A genre with a fraught relation to its own gendered implications, artists worked to unravel still life’s proximity to the domestic in the wake of newly won emancipation for women”. [page 60]. This is shortly before discussing the work of Winifred Nicholson. John Bratby’s Still life with Chip Frier “problematises the masculine individual’s conflicted position in the postwar home”. The catalogue section devoted to the 1950s and 60s is more a history of Pop Art than a study of still lifes.

 

At other times, the curators are keen to detect signs of Britishness in the art, for example, Edward Wadsworth’s Bright Intervals: “in his concern with maritime instruments and depictions of nautical life, it is possible to detect … “the consciousness of an islander”. I think that reveals more about the curator than about the work.  

 

My impression from the show is that there is a magical appeal of still lifes, and towards the end the curators rather grudgingly accept this. Michael Bird tries desperately to avoid using the word “domestic”, instead using “sociable”, and describing still lifes as depicting “objective reality where order reigns”. But he catches something of the magic when he describes the “stillness, lucidity and calm” of the best still lifes.

 

Towards the end of the catalogue, there is some kind of acceptance of what I would describe as the quiet tradition of still life at its best: 

For all its mundanity and portrayal of humble objects, still life has the capacious ability to express the human condition and shared experience, a manifest of the time and society in which it was made. It is perhaps in this, that still life acquires its contemplative, reflective qualities. [Melanie Vandenbrouck, p143]

That understated subject matter, combined with exquisite detail, is seen beautifully in Poppy Jones Water Glass and Thistle (2024), bringing a fine tradition up to the present day.