OBJECTS FOR DESIRE

THE POWER OF PERCEPTION IN SCOTTISH MODERN STILL LIFE

If content is something that is contained, then it seems to me that the work of art is not a container; that it does not contain, but is something that allows something to pass through to someone in sympathy.

JD Fergusson, Modern Scottish Painting

The majority of people in Scotland would probably still concur with the notion that the most fruitful place to look for the source of their national identity is the Scottish landscape. This still prevalent romantic idea was made extremely influential through the writings of Walter Scott who believed that every hill and river of Caledonia resounded and reverberated with echoes of Scotland’s turbulent past. On the other hand however, before the creation of Scott’s historical novels, most inhabitants of that country would have had a very different view – seeing the fractured landscape of Scotland as clear evidence of the split nature of Scottish social and cultural identity. Previous to Culloden and the Clearances the northern Highlands was home to the separate Gaelic communities with their distinctive customs and language; while in the southern Lowlands the Sassenach Scots pursued a way of life very different from the Gaels. By the later nineteenth century however, Walter Scott’s most illustrious successor, the exiled Thomas Carlyle, cut off from his native abode, no longer looked to landscape, but the human history of Scotland as the inspiring examples of true Scottishness. Carlyle’s exemplar Scots were of course carefully selected from the great and the good, and to forge their inspirational example as a permanent reminder of national greatness he strove successfully to have a temple built to their immortal memory in the form of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. In more recent times a new attitude has emerged where the elusive Holy Grail of national identity is sought for, not in the achievements of heroic patriots, nor in the stirring settings of their great deeds, but in the physical things that history has left behind. We now live in an age of material culture where we Scots make our pilgrimage to the Museum of Scotland – a cornucopia of absorbing artefacts which stir and excite the national memory and which helps us to find and celebrate the roots and nature of our intrinsic selves as a common community. Furthermore, on a more individual and intimate level, it is now the humble still life painting, and not the swaggering portrait or the sentimental landscape, which is more likely to stir our imagination and hold our attention in our continuing quest to find out who we are, and what moves us most deeply.

The intellectual and aesthetic discourse on the growing impact of materialism goes back to the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment in Scotland. It was the radical ideas of the Scottish literati, and especially the philosophical scepticism of David Hume, which focussed rational attention more and more away from the realm of the metaphysical and the transcendental towards that of the mundane experience of the everyday which Roland Barthes described in his essay The World as Object as ‘man and his empire of things’. The figure who was most responsible for pioneering a new scientific enquiry into the complex experience of this world of tangible objects was Hume’s equally renowned contemporary, Adam Smith. Today he is mainly remembered for his monumentally important work An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations which could be described as a blueprint for the emerging Western capitalist system and consumer society. From this profoundly influential economic discourse some have seen Smith as another Doctor Frankenstein creating a new creature – the Homo Ecomonicus who only lives by the desire for financial profit and the pursuit of self-interest. This one-side view of Smith’s philosophy is however, a gross misunderstanding and distortion of his ideas. Smith in fact, was not just concerned with the production and the price of desirable things, but more importantly with their true value through how they might be used and enjoyed for the full benefit of a progressive community. This attitude is most clearly seen in Smith’s other major publication The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In this work the Scottish philosopher powerfully argues that what binds a civic society is not the ruthless pursuit of self gratification; but rather, the sympathetic bonding of each of its citizens to each other and the mutual beneficial material world which we can create for all. It is those feelings – or ‘moral sentiments’, which, through the power of the human imagination and fellow feeling, allows us to have an empathic relationship with the experiences of other people, as well as our connectedness with the unique nature of the objects which also have their being in the same world as us. As JD Fergusson points out, all true modern art is based on this sympathetic bond, and this is especially the case with still life painting where the relationship of the creative subject to the inspiring object is so intimate and direct.

Even though throughout most of its history, still life retained a lowly reputation
within academic circles, it always had a secure, if relatively unimportant,
position within the Western canon. With the European academies’ inordinate
respect for the taste of the Classical world, the fact that still life painting was
admired and keenly sought by Graeco-Roman connoisseurs established its
reputation for subsequent generations. Furthermore, the fact that Pliny the Elder’s
first century Latin text, Natural History included stories of how celebrated ancient
artists such as Zuexis could paint a bowl of grapes so convincingly that birds
tried to peck his pictorial fruit, sanctioned the inclusion of still life painting in the
collection of any serious art lover. Such painting was however, still seen as more
to do with skilful craft rather than uplifting art. This was mainly due to the fact that
while other kinds of pictures – for example portraits – were individually commissioned.

by a patron, still life paintings were usually produced for the mass
demand of the marketplace like any other commodity. Thus still life was regarded
as having more to do with material commerce rather than human culture. There
were on the other hand critical attempts to raise the intellectual status of still life
by reading the objects in the pictures symbolically, and not merely mimetically. The most famous example of this was the vanitas type still life which usually
included such items as candles and skulls to remind the viewer of the brevity of
human life and the certainty of death. However it was not still life’s conscripted
role as pictorial sermon which gave it lasting popularity, but its very lack of
challenging intellectual and moralising content. Unlike other types of art the
humble still life usually only required the viewer to used their eyes and admire the
artist’s technical skills in convincingly rendering the detailed appearances of
everyday reality. It was the Dutch painters of the seventeenth century who were
generally regarded as the supreme masters of this visual feat of pictorial
illusionism. Up until the mid-nineteenth century, the democratic and egalitarian
character of still life, where everyone from a marquise to a maid could equally
enjoy such amenable images, tended to work against its reputation and make it
easy to dismiss it as of little serious cultural consequence. Things, however,
radically changed with the rapid development of the modern urban and
industrial era where man-made objects increasingly became the predominant
feature of the new bourgeois world. Now quotidian material reality had to be
urgently addressed by artists in all its visual complexity. From Manet and the
Impressionists onwards many modern painters tackled this new aspect of social
reality in their own individual way through the aegis of still life. These modernists
used the rich interpretive possibilities of still life in more and more complex ways,
culminating in the almost impenetrable density of layered pictorial iconography
found in the cubist works of Picasso and Braque. Ironically by the beginning of
the twentieth century the reputation of still life had turned full circle – from
previously being regarded as the least demanding and most accessible genre to
become an extremely challenging kind of painting to understand and critically
appreciate!

The paintings in this exhibition are all examples of modern still life – and this qualification is important. The academic still life of the previous art historical era was, like all the other artistic genres, defined, not by stylistic interpretation, but by subject content – or what Fergusson terms ‘the container’. With modern still life, on the other hand, what the artist presents to the viewer is not a depiction of an everyday subject in a highly illusionistic manner as in the past, but something infinitely more important – a highly personal response and expression of the artist’s own perceptive and interpretive relationship and attitude to that subject. Again it was a member of the Scottish Enlightenment, Thomas Reid in his The Craft of Painting who drew our attention to the crucial difference between objective and subjective perspectives in the making and understanding of picture-making like still life. Reid warned, ‘I cannot entertain the hope of being intelligible to those who have not acquired the habit of distinguishing the appearance of objects to the eye, from the judgment which they form of their colour, distance, magnitude and figure. The only profession wherein it is necessary to make this distinction is that of painting.’ Furthermore, it is those very essential elements – colour, distance etc – in modern still life which should primarily and consistently hold our gaze. This certainly was the view of Reid’s twentieth century follower, the French phenomenologist, Merleau-Ponty who in Art and the World of Perception boldly stated, ‘thus the work of art resembles the object of perception … So painting does not imitate the world but is a world of its own, creating on the canvas a spectacle which is sufficient unto itself.’ In other words, modern painting must communicate with us in its own unique and distinctive language of visual representation and expression.

Modern artists have now freed themselves from the ‘containing’ tyranny of trompe l’oeil illusionism and the need to present the image of the material world behind a veil of appearances that plagued the role of previous still life painting. No longer is the meaning of the still life picture solely contained in its mimetic relationship with its outside subject; but rather, is to be found in the imaginative and aesthetic experience that the artist expresses and conveys to the viewer in the language and specific requirements of painting itself. This idea was succinctly expressed by one of the greatest painters of modern still life – the late Craigie Aitchison, when he explained to one of his interviewers, ‘I do invent things if I have to … but they would have to be taken out if they weren’t right.’ Being a superb master of the art of modern still life, Craigie Aitchison nearly always got it ‘right’ – that is when he, the artist, found the moment where he could fully identify with his painterly interpretation of his still life subject. I hope, in their own individual way, this is also the case with most of the very varied examples of Scottish modern still life painting in this exhibition.

Bill Hare, January, 2010