Siri Hustvedt: Yonder: Essays

In Guston there is a rare harmony between the poetic texts he often used in his drawings and the images near them, despite the fact that the drawings are never straightforward illustrations of the words. The poems of William Corbett and Clark Coolidge, for example, are inscribed into the drawing without disjunction. Guston wrote out the texts himself with his own hand. The drawings and the words are both gestural. Painter’s Forms is exactly what it says it is. Objects, Guston seems to tell us, are my new medium. Through them I articulate myself and the world in which I live. They are not limiting forms but liberating ones. They are outside me and inside me. They are of my body and not of it. Guston’s still lifes speak to the fact that the world penetrates us. We eat, smoke, and have sex. But language and images enter us, too. They become us. And in art they are spewed forth again, transfigured and renewed.

Still life is the art of the small thing, an art of holding on to the bits and pieces of our lives. Some of these things we glimpse in the frame of a painting are ephemeral — food, cut flowers, tobacco — and others, like the clutter in a dead man’s attic, are objects that will survive us. The paintings speak to our wish to live and to our dread of dying, but because the space inside the frame is a figment and the things it holds are imaginary, they have the eerie quality of the impossible: a permanent dream. I often dream of objects, and when I do, they are always close to my nose. I am pressed up against them — a toothbrush or a pair of scissors or a pen. They are dreams of uncanny scrutiny. Dreaming is part of living, and its images are a form of memory in which the stuff of the everyday is recycled. Art is a kind of memory, too. A sausage is reinvented on a canvas. I will never cut it or eat it. But it is there in a parallel space that I enter nevertheless, and even though Chardin’s painting is no longer in front of my eyes, the image remains. It has fixed itself in my mind as no real sausage ever could. Still life, like all art, happens through selection. One thing is chosen over another, and through the artist’s choice, my eyes find a new focus. Chardin’s painting is not a reflection of the tables laid with sausages and knives that I have seen in my own life but a spectral reincarnation of that familiarity. The experience of looking at art, like the experience of dreaming, is often more concentrated than waking life. Despite the inimitable present tense of every painting, it is always about the past. I do not mean its duration — how many years the canvas may have hung on a wall. I mean that what I am looking at is the representation of a thing which has a history in the mind and body of another person. I am looking at a work — at a “painter’s forms.” And this looking is a little like having someone else’s dream. Because the objects of still life are ordinary — a sausage, a melon, a bowl, a boot — their translation into paint intensifies them. They are dignified by the metamorphosis we call art.

Vermeer’s Annunciation

1. Arthur Wheelock, Vermeer and the Art of Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 22–24.

2. Tzvetan Todorov, Éloge du Quotidien: Essai sur la peinture hollandaise de XVII siècle (Paris: Société nouvelle Adam Biro, 1993), 43–53.

3. For these two examples, see reproductions of the Annunciation by Giusto de’ Menabuoi (p. 48) and an Annunciation (by Dieric Bouts (p. 296), in Giotto to Dürer: Early Renaissance Painting in the National Gallery, by Jill Dunkerton, Susan Foister, Dillian Gordon, and Nicholas Penny (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).

4. Albert Blankert, Catalogue Johannes Vermeer, p. 39.

Ghosts at the Table

5. Quoted in Cézanne by John Rewald (New York: Abrams, 1986), p. 221.

6. Quoted in Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston by Musa Mayer (New York: Knopf, 1988), p. 141.