Siri Hustvedt - Yonder - Essays

A hundred years before Chardin, Juan Sanchez Cotan painted still lifes that inhabit a radically different universe. His luminous fruits and vegetables have an uncanny clarity that jolts the spectator. It is not a problem of recognition. I recognize each food in Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber, and yet these fruits and vegetables do not remind me of those in my own kitchen, as Chardin’s do. It is as if these foods have been overexposed. The melon reveals a surgical slash made by a knife’s incision. The suspended cabbage and quince, the resting melon and cucumber are immaculate, discrete entities. The painting’s effect relies on the clean separation of one thing from another. In this work, no food touches the other. As Bryson points out, Cotan’s still lifes are rooted in the monastic life he lived as a lay brother of the Carthusian order, an order that emphasized solitude. Bryson links Cotan’s painting to the imaginative use of the senses in Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. In Cotan’s work, vision is heightened and sharpened.

When I look at this food, I am awed, and I would guess this is exactly the feeling I am supposed to have. In the world, food becomes part of the body. It enters us, is used, and the excess is expelled as waste. Digestion blurs the line between the eater and the eaten. In Chardin, there is a comfortable relation between the absent bodies and the food that is meant to enter them. In Cotan, we know we are looking at food, and we know that food is to be eaten. In this painting, part of the melon has been consumed, but eating is part of a larger order of things, an order that relies on clear separations — among them, a clean cut between the body and the outside world. The fasting and sexual abstinence practiced by the Carthusians as acts of purification and denial are attempts to seal off the body from the outside. This is not an impulse limited to religious orders. Modern anorexics are driven by a similar desire. Bryson evokes the Spiritual Exercises to illuminate the role of vision in approaching the sacred, but the Exercises also present us with a formal schedule of classification and discipline, by which means daily life may be perfectly ordered. In his book Sade, Fourier, Loyola (Hill and Wang, 1978), Roland Barthes notes that the Exercises propose a way to completely cover the day, so that no moment is free. This absolute coverage takes pictorial form in these precisely rendered and neatly distinguished fruits and vegetables. (I can’t help thinking of the seven-year-old who has a horror of his peas sliding into his mashed potatoes.) Behind the food is a black, rectangular void. This dark space is not the space of perception. It is unreal, abstract, and it suggests not a solid wall but infinity. This is food as sacred gift shining inside, not a human order but one ordained by God. When I look at this painting, I do not feel the presence of the brother who ate that piece of melon. I do not even feel the painter. I am alone, staring into something both strange and incomprehensible. Like a monk, I am alone with God.

Chardin and Cotan may be said to occupy the psychological poles of still life. Chardin eases every separation, between the viewer and what is viewed but also among the objects he paints. There is no strain in looking at his food and objects. It is their very ordinariness that enchants them. Cotan is all strain, discipline, and withholding, qualities so rigorous that the ordinary becomes extraordinary.

Most of Dutch still life painting resides somewhere between these two poles. Willem Claesz’s painting Vanitas serves as a good example of a middle ground. In it we see smoking paraphernalia, a plate, knife, bowl of fruit, a strangely tilted glass vase, and a skull. It is a somber image. The silver bowl is opulent and beautiful but dimly illuminated; a subtle gleam of light appears on its base, a gleam echoed on the vase, which then reappears more dimly on the skull. Without the skull, the painting would be different, but it would remain sobering. The objects on the table are not in perfect order, but the scene isn’t slovenly either. It is true that the plate hangs slightly over the table’s edge, as does one of the pipes, but it isn’t in danger of falling. The object that does seem precarious is the vase, tipped dangerously to the right. The object’s angle seems to imply that it is about to shatter. As I look at it, the tension between the left and the right side of the canvas begins to seem dramatic. My eye is pulled from the upright form of the bowl over to the leaning vase and tipped skull. It is a movement from relative order to disorder, which is then restabilized by the vertical candleholder above the skull. This is not an image of chaos but one in which order and chaos, life and death coexist and define each other. Of course, Claesz’s skull carries the message of universal mortality far more pointedly than Chardin. The skull is the ultimate meeting ground of the spectator and the object, because we are projected into it. I will eventually become it. The skull, along with animal carcasses, is a recurring image in still life. These things qualify literally as still life, as nature morte, because, in death, living creatures become objects. The depiction of a human corpse would share this quality, but showing whole human bodies, living or dead, is not traditionally part of the genre. The skull, however, fits neatly on a table. It is important to note that a human thighbone could never have the power of a skull. The skull retains the outlines of the human face, and people are drawn to it. This attraction is very possibly a physiological one. Infants are drawn to faces almost immediately. The holes in a skull, in which there once were eyes, the empty cranium, which once was the seat of an individual consciousness, carry the clear traces of a living past.

The skull returns again and again in the form. Max Beckmann’s 1945 Still Life with Three Skulls uses the old image to new and terrifying effect. Claesz is reminding us of mortality. Beckmann’s table with skulls, a bottle, and playing cards reminds us of recent human slaughter. Soutine’s Carcass of Beef (1924) is similar in its intent. This canvas vividly shows us an animal’s bloody entrails and with it the suggestion that the animal has just been killed. The longer you look at it, the more you feel that its screaming ended only moments ago. In all of these still lifes, from Cotan to Chardin to Claesz to the modern examples of Beckmann and Soutine, the canvases are drenched with meaning. They cannot be reduced to “messages.” The great allegorical paintings of the Dutch are not one-liners. The relationship between an object and the way it figures in these allegories is neither simple nor direct. Chardin’s still lifes are heavy with emotion, but the production of that feeling cannot be reduced to the depiction of one object or another. Nevertheless, these works draw from and play with a known pictorial vocabulary through which they produce complex meanings.

Cézanne wanted something different. His still lifes are phenomenological. The spectator is alone and supreme, and the appetite that remains is one for looking, not eating. I am not tempted by Cézanne’s pears in Still Life with Ginger Jar and Eggplants, because they are not pears. They are forms in the space of my perception (just as the ginger jar next to them is). The pears are elevated, not out of their thingness but out of their ordinary role as food. And the light has changed. Chardin, like the Dutch and Flemish before him, worked within the darkness of thick walls and filtered light, but now the doors and windows have been thrown open and light shines onto these objects to illuminate them as prelinguistic entities. It may seem odd to speak of images in terms of language. Pictures are supposed to escape the confines of words. But language is the grid through which we see the world, and in still life, naming is implied in looking. The humility of the depicted things creates a more direct relation between the noun and its meaning, a relation that is less direct, for example, in a narrative history painting. The food and vessels of Chardin are all named and known. They live inside a universe of fully articulated domestic habit that comforts us with their familiarity. There is a clove of garlic sitting next to a coffeepot. It has rolled toward the edge of the table, probably during the preparation of a meal. In Cotan, the identification of each fruit and vegetable designated in the title is cast in an almost terrifying clarity that seems to enhance its identity as God given, as though the painter is striving toward a pre-Babel world. The wonder of Cézanne comes from refusing the categories of a given, common language. What Chardin celebrates, Cézanne rejects.