After flourishing under Dutch-born William III and his English wife Queen Mary, when the Glorious Revolution of 1688 set in motion a vogue for all things from Holland, still life spent 300 years languishing as the lowliest artistic genre. Now a new exhibition traces how the art form enjoyed a renaissance in the early 20th century, thanks in no small measure to the impact of a number of Jewish immigrant artists.
The Shape of Things at Pallant House in Chichester, West Sussex opens with a prelude looking at works of the Flanders and Netherlands artists who, in the late 1600s, made their home in Britain.
Edward Collier (1642-1708) trained in Haarlem and came to London in 1693. Vanitas Still Life (1694) was painted a year after his arrival in England. Collier inscribed it with the words “Vanitas Vanitatum Omnia Vanitas” in the foreground, emphasising that the pleasures of the depicted musical instruments, books and globe, arranged on a table, are transitory and powerless against the inevitability of death.
Simon Martin, director of Pallant House, notes how still life was not a native British tradition, but a foreign import from the continent.
The Shape of Things, Pallant House Gallery. (Photo: Joe Low)
“As an artform, still life, its subjects and its artists, encapsulate the flow of ideas, individuals and objects across national boundaries through trade and migration,” he explains of its history here.
Spitalfields-born Mark Gertler (1891-1939) spoke only Yiddish until the age of eight. His Austrian-Jewish parents had been repatriated to southern Poland, then his mother moved the family to London.
While still a student Gertler exhibited at his first group exhibition at Vanessa Bell’s Friday Club in 1911, showing a red chalk portrait of one his Spital Square neighbours entitled Head of a Girl. In the winter of 1910-11 Gertler was swept up in the experimentation wave flowing from Roger Fry’s seminal exhibition Manet and the Post Impressionists, introducing English audiences to the work of Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Picasso. Gertler began experimenting with brighter colours and flatter styles.
Mark Gertler's The Dutch Doll. 1926, oil on canvas, Brighton & Hove Museums.
This era of innovation also marks the point when still life’s potential to explore composition, form, shape and colour reinvigorated British art.
On the fringes of the Bloomsbury Group, Gertler became known for his elaborate still lives in the 1920s. Stylistically, Gertler’s The Dutch Doll (1920) anticipates surrealism, with its choice of symbolic elements. The subject of the Dutch doll connects the painting to British surrealist Eileen Agar, whose collage The Object Lesson (1940) is in the next room at Pallant.
The artist’s most famous work, The Merry Go Round (1916) is on display at Tate Britain. Expressing Gertler’s pacifism through the screaming mouths of the uniformed riders, the monumental work was unsold during his lifetime. Merry Go Round was inspired by a fair for wounded veterans held on Hampstead Heath, near the home studio where Gertler worked from 1915. Struggling with tuberculosis, financial pressures and depression, Gertler took his own life in 1939 in his studio.
The artist Gluck (1895-1978) also lived in Hampstead, working in a studio designed by Edward Maufe, architect of Guildford Cathedral. Her family owned Lyons Teahouses. Born Hannah Gluckstein, the artist challenged gender expectations, rejecting gendered identifiers preferring simply “Gluck, no prefix, no suffix, no quotes”.
Gluck was a fine portraitist, but her floral still lifes are the most interesting because they cut through the idea of a gendered still life. In Lords and Ladies (1936), she depicts the poisonous British plant with pointed leaves, bulbous flowers and deep red pollen, arranged in a rectangular vase, on a marble plinth. In a challenge to the stereotype of female artists painting flowers, Gluck consciously doesn’t paint blousy or pretty flowers, she paints things that are structured and defy gender expectations.
The artist Gluck's work titled Lords and Ladies.1936, Oil on canvas, Private Collection, London.
In a note to her lover Nesta Obermer, Gluck observed about Lords and Ladies: “How can these flowers be female? Anything more male than this prominent feature I cannot imagine?”
Gluck’s traditional subjects, displayed in contemporary interiors, were an acceptable face of modernism. The critic R H Wilenski described the fusion of still life paintings and the interiors they were intended for as “wall furniture”.
While her hyper-realism can be seen as hinting towards surrealism, Gluck was a member of no artistic group and practised as an individual.
The 1930s drove an influx of talent to Britain. Hans Feibusch (1898-1998), whose work is in Pallant’s permanent collection, arrived from Frankfurt in 1933, and four years later his work was included in the Nazi’s Degenerate Art exhibition. Feibusch’s Untitled Still Life (1935) evokes the uneasiness at a time of escalating tension.
A sculpted head, candle, vase and shell are tightly arranged a on a single plane, and illuminated by a flickering candle, a common still-life motif, which may symbolise the breath of life and the fragility of human existence.
It may also symbolise light in darkness, a sign of hope. Ten year old Lucian Freud (1922-2011) also arrived from Berlin in 1933, with his family. Unripe Tangerine, 1946-47 was painted while in Greece with his friend the painter John Craxton. Freud’s precisely rendered green fruit with pitted skin, is the inverse of the bright orange tangerine of wartime rationing fantasy. Dead game and meat had been a subject of still life over the centuries, and Freud’s watercolour Dead Bird (1943), with its unexpected viewpoint of an elongated fowl on its back, references both food shortages and wartime decay.
Lucian Freud's Unripe Tangerine. 1946-47, oil on board, Wilson Loan 2006.
Edmund de Waal’s father Victor fled Vienna for Britain in 1939 when he was ten. De Waal’s (b.1964) September Song II (2020) arranges four small objects: a porcelain vessel, two golden gilded tiles, and an alabaster block in a pristine white shelf box. The objects speak of transfiguration through kiln, brush and chisel.
British-Israeli artist Ori Gersht’s Evertime 05 (2018) is one of the first works visitors see in The Shape of Things. Using specially commissioned replicas of white vessels painted by Italian painter Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), Gersht captures their moment of fragmentation from an air rifle shot, demonstrating still life’s infinite capacity for spectacle as well as stillness.
The Shape of Things: Still Life in Britain, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester until October 20.
pallant.org.uk/whats-on/the-shape-of-things-still-life-in-britain/
