Still Life

Two essential writers, Zbigniew Herbert and Guy Davenport, both of whom prized civilization and were themselves highly civilized, and neither of whom was conventionally considered an art historian, addressed the subject of still life painting. Included in Herbert’s Elegy for the Departure and Other Poems is a prose poem, “Still Life”:

“Violently separated from life, these shapes were scattered on the table with deliberate carelessness: a fish, an apple, a handful of vegetables mixed with flowers. A dead leaf of light has been added, and a bird with a bleeding head. In its petrified claws the bird clenches a small planet made of emptiness, and air taken away.”

Herbert also published a collection of essays and what he called “apocryphas,” Still Life with a Bridle, a wayward meditation on the aesthetic legacy of 17th-century Holland. The title essay relates Herbert’s discovery, in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, of a painting by an artist previously unknown to him: Jan Simon van der Beeck (1589-1644), better known as Torrentius. The painting, the only work by Torrentius known to have survived, that captivated Herbert lent its title to his essay and collection, and is reproduced on the Ecco paperback edition I own. Herbert describes it as “a calm, static still life,” depicting a clay pitcher, a half-filled glass goblet, a pewter pitcher, two porcelain pipes, paper with musical notations, a book and, impossible to identify without Herbert’s help, a bridle. He writes:

“The background was the most fascinating of all: black, deep as a precipice and at the same time as flat as a mirror, palpable and disappearing in perspectives of infinity. A transparent cover over the abyss.”

In the reproduction on the cover of my copy, the painting is overwhelmingly black and mysterious. Near the end of his 28-page essay, Herbert writes:

“So many questions. I did not manage to break the code. The enigmatic painter, the incomprehensible man, begins to pass from the plane of investigation based on flimsy sources to an indistinct sphere of fantasy, the domain of tellers of tales.”

Herbert’s essay is written like a mystery, with Herbert himself in the role of self-confessed failure as a detective. Who was Torrentius? Political martyr (an appealing figure for a poet in Poland) or mad man? A civilized man can live with such ambiguities and uncertainties, and even relish them.

In Objects on a Table: Harmonious Disarray in Art and Literature, Davenport devotes an entire playful, discursive, scholarly volume to the still life, starting with its origins in Egypt (food for the dead) and Israel (the Book of Amos). He writes:

“Still life is a minor art, and one with a residue of didacticism that will never bleach out; a homely art. From the artist’s point of view, it has always served as a contemplative form used for working out ideas, color schemes, opinions. It has the same relation to larger, more ambitious paintings as the sonnet to the long poem….We must not, however, imagine that still life is inconsequential or trivial.”

And later:

“Still life belongs in the slow sinews of a great swell that began with the cultivation of wheat and the fermentation of wine, bread and wine being two of its permanent images. It is an art that is symbiotic with civilization.”

With calm confidence, Davenport makes typically audacious generalizations:

“In still life, down through history, we find an ongoing meditation on where matter ends and spirit begins, and on the nature of their interdependence. Joyce, who left no art untouched or unchallenged, deployed still lifes throughout his work. The first sentence of Ulysses is one: `Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.”

Davenport’s book itself, originally presented as the Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto in 1982, is a sort of still life, an artful arrangement of four essays. In “A Remark Beforehand” he writes:

“However unprofessional and even deplorable they will appear to some scholars, they may be of interest to the common reader and intelligent children. Each is it self a disarray of perceptions and conjunctions in which the unlikelihood of harmony vies with the promise of coherence in the titles.”