Audubon to Warhol: The Art of American Still Life

This archive article was originally published in the Winter 2015 issue of Antiques & Fine Art magazine.

The first major survey of American still life painting in over three decades, Audubon to Warhol: The Art of American Still Life at the Philadelphia Museum of Art brings together one hundred and thirty masterworks by ninety artists. The exhibition offers fresh perspective on American art and cultural history by exploring the prevailing ways of seeing and relating to objects in still life at different times.

The exhibition recognizes four consecutive episodes of still life practice, each characterized by a distinct, shared culture of objects. In Philadelphia at the dawn of the nineteenth century, under the influence of portraitist and naturalist Charles Willson Peale, still life emerged at the border of art and science. Recording objects, both natural and manmade, to understand them both as a reflection of self as well as of an emergent national identity, the first generation of American still life painters created a remarkably mature body of work, organized in the exhibition under the rubric “describing.” This pioneering generation that included both Raphaelle Peale and John James Audubon matured quickly and disappeared with equal speed during the later 1840s. These sudden starts and stops in the practice of still life are unique to the genre and record the influence of wider cultural forces.

The exhibition’s later eras—“indulging” during the mid-nineteenth century, “discerning” at its far end, and “animating” in the early-twentieth century—mirror still life’s periodic resurgence and dynamics beyond the world of art. The symbolic language of flowers, for example, which was commonly understood and appreciated during the mid-nineteenth century, is today largely unknown. A significant dimension of the appreciation and delight of American still life arises from understanding such contexts, which the exhibition will reveal for a new generation.

With his monumental Birds of America, John James Audubon invited his audience to look alongside him at the wonders of American ornithology. Declaring his work both art and science, Audubon offered a new, vibrant vision of American nature by wiring his specimens in life-like poses and simulating their characteristic behaviors. Carolina parakeets, a species once abundant and now extinct, were constant companions to Audubon on his rambles in search of new birds and were also favorites of his predecessor Alexander Wilson. With this dynamic, masterful composition of the flocking birds, Audubon created one of the icons of his project and also differentiated his work from the tradition of scientific illustration. This was something new.

Charles Willson Peale’s eldest surviving son, Raphaelle, bore the weight of his father’s expectations for the next generation of American artists. Raphaelle’s unremunerative artistic career did not fulfill his father’s ambition for American art. And yet, Raphaelle persisted. In still life, he found a deeply personal form. Again and again, he composed compelling, intimate arrangements of objects that suggest metaphors of experience, both mundane and sublime; here he portrays the individual cells of a simple orange with suggestive allusion and absorptive intensity that manifest ambition of a different sort.

Intoxication may be characterized as the prevailing attribute of mid-nineteenth-century American still life. The heightening of the senses that is characteristic of the period’s still life aesthetics is the easily-inferred product of the alcohol it so often depicts. Arrangements of glasses and overflowing plates of food convey a sense of convivial, social delight. Cognac and Biscuits is an early example of John F. Francis’ still life work that demonstrates unusual restraint for the artist. Over time, his successful lunch and dessert scenes grew in colorism, scale, and complexity.

In the late 1840s, American still life took on a very different tone, epitomized by Edward A. Goodes’ Fishbowl Fantasy. A luxuriant invocation of romantic love between correspondents Frank and Isabel, who are identified in the letters on the marble tabletop, Goodes’ composition amplifies the attributes of his subjects into a confection of sensory excess. The arrangement of a young woman’s discarded hat, fan, gloves, and cross on the table suggest her recent return home as well as her haste to read the letter from her beau. Typical of the period, Goodes includes little suggestion of the brevity of life or moral observations that were hallmarks of the Dutch Golden Age, favoring instead the depiction of unblemished beauty at its peak.

Christian Schussele’s Ocean Life was created for reproduction as a color print to accompany James Sommerville’s pamphlet of the same title that explores the wonders of the ocean floor in the language of popular science. Schussele’s image mimics the logic of an aquarium, its subjects mostly featured in the near foreground in a shallow space. This was the era of the popularization of parlors—spaces for the entertainment of family and guests—and of parlor amusements, including aquariums. Showing an assortment of species from various parts of the Americas and accompanied by a printed key to identify the subjects illustrated in the composition, Schussele’s watercolor promised ample stimulation for conversation in any home.

At about the time of the nation’s Centennial in 1876, American still life shifted once again. Working in both modernist and trompe l’oeil styles, artists of the late century saw themselves as arbiters of taste and discernment, whose task it was to cultivate those attributes in their viewers. Joseph Rodefer DeCamp’s Blue Cup illustrates the pleasure available to anyone, regardless of class, who has an eye for beauty. The young maid is herself presented as a subject of beauty and purity, akin to the Chinese blue-and-white porcelain she holds up to the light to admire. Her encounter celebrates the pleasure, satisfaction, and enlightenment attained by admiring beautiful things.

The Twentieth Century Limited locomotive was an icon of its age, a beacon of hope, renewal, and progress in America at the end of the Great Depression. Sheeler’s depiction of the train for Fortune magazine was created as part of a series of images on the theme American industrial power. The expectant energy of the train’s undercarriage concentrates on the transfer of energy from the engine through the drive rods to the massive wheels, each over six-and-a-half feet high. Sheeler transforms the might and size of the new machine into an assembly of rational forms of almost classical order and proportions. In the early twentieth century, American still life painters experimented with many such related depictions of energy, both vital and mechanical, in an almost infinite variety of styles.

Flowers and their potential for aesthetic arrangement and display provided an important subject for artists of the late nineteenth century, approaching abstraction. Informed by her study with John La Farge and her time in France, Dewing admired flowers’ “removed beauty that exists only for beauty, more abstract than it can be in the human being, even more exquisite.” In the midst of hardening class divisions and anxiety over social unrest at the end of the nineteenth century, still life artists contributed to a reassuring, aspirational culture of good character.

At the far end of aesthetics from Dewing’s evocative flowers stands the contemporary hard-edged illusionism of William Michael Harnett. The astonishing realism of Harnett’s Mr. Hulings’ Rack Picture excites the viewer’s sense of touch. Its dark backdrop pushes the letters and cards forward even as the raking light picks up and emphasizes every tear and fold in the nominally flat papers. Harnett’s painting invites the viewer to explore reality and understand the power of illusion. The period’s rampant corruption and displacement rendered the ability to discern truth—like the ability to discern beauty—a valued attribute and marker of good character.

Frustrated by what she perceived as widespread misunderstanding of her floral subjects as veiled eroticism during the 1920s, Georgia O’Keeffe strove instead to create a sense of large-scale immediacy in her paintings that viewers could not ignore. Her closeness to the paired calla lilies here provides a sense of that urgency and connection, while their swelling movement ties in with her modernist peers working in more abstract styles. Resisting the alienation of modern life, O’Keeffe’s still lifes of flowers and bones bind the viewer to a close, physical experience of things.

Still life was tailor made for Pop Art, a movement named for its engagement with popular culture during the 1960s and 1970s.  Rife with irony, wit, and allusion, Pop revitalized still life’s idiom as well as its embrace of mass-produced consumer products. Andy Warhol would become the movement’s most famous exponent, and his Brillo Boxes among its icons. The red, white, and blue Brillo Boxes portray a familiar brand for Americans (and, increasingly, the rest of the world). Warhol’s “giant size packages” of Brillo Pads have “rust resistor” and promise to return aluminum pots to a bright shine, reversing the blemishes of use and age. This is the great promise of consumer culture—the more you buy, the more you live—and Brillo’s patriotic color scheme aligns its brand with America itself.

Audubon to Warhol: The Art of American Still Life has since closed, but was on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through January 10, 2016.

Mark D. Mitchell is the Holcombe T. Green Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at Yale University Art Gallery. Formerly he was Associate Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture and Manager of the Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where he organized Audubon to Warhol: The Art of American Still Life.

This article was originally published in the Winter 2015 issue of Antiques & Fine Art magazine, a digitized version of which is available on afamag.com. Antiques & Fine Art and AFAmag are affiliated with Incollect.