Historically the 'lowest' genre of painting within the European tradition, the humble still life has captivated artists, patrons and enthusiasts alike throughout its long history.
Beyond merely depicting an object, still life paintings can grapple with mortality, desire and our perception of reality, while challenging artists to transform the familiar into something extraordinary.
Still Life, Then and Now traces the development of the European still life tradition from the sixteenth century to the present day. From its early proponents in Germany and the Low Countries, the genre has constantly evolved: flourishing alongside the growing collector classes of the seventeenth century, refined and expanded for the ever more engaged art public in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, transformed by the visionary and radical approaches of modern artists, and arriving today as a genre that holds a relevant and nuanced place in contemporary art.
With an essay by Yale professor emerita in art history C. M. Armstrong, this fully-illustrated catalogue also includes short texts on each of the artworks presented in the exhibition.
Featured artists include historic masters Osias Beert the Elder, Willem Claesz. Heda, Bartolomeo Cavorozzi, Michelangelo Cerquozzi, Giovanni Battista Recco, Sebastian Stoskopff, Antonio Ponce, Francisco de Zurbarán and Anne Vallayer-Coster; 19th-century artists Henri Fantin-Latour, Victoria Dubourg, Odilon Redon and Giovanni Segantini; and modernist pioneers Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, Pierre Bonnard, Nicolas de Staël, Philip Guston and Andy Warhol, alongside contemporary artists Poppy Jones and Asher Liftin.