Research Catalog

Title

The object as subject : studies in the interpretation of still life / edited by Anne W. Lowenthal.

Publication

Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, ©1996.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

Lowenthal, Anne W.

Description

xii, 140 pages, 52 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color); 25 cm

Summary

• The purpose of these essays is to mine the complexity and expressive richness of still-life painting, traditionally considered one of the lesser genres. Although theorists have commented on the appeal of still life since antiquity, its status has risen only recently, when the priorities of art history and criticism have been reordered to validate areas outside the canon of traditional inquiry. Here six distinguished scholars interpret a wide range of still lifes, using diverse current methods, including paleo-ethnobotanical research (which makes it possible to reconstruct diets), social history, technical examinations, and material culture studies.
• The introduction provides a historiography of still life with an emphasis on the twentieth century. The essays' scope is wide, encompassing sixteenth- to twentieth-century European and American painting, graphics, the applied arts, book illustration, sculpture, and photography. The common denominator is a focus on the implications of the things - foodstuffs, tableware, plaster statuettes, books - that form the subject matter of the images. Scrutinizing those objects and their significance, the writers enhance understanding of the objects themselves, the images in which they figure, and the minds and cultures that produced both.

Subjects

• Art
• Still-life in art

Genre/Form

• Essay
• essays.
• works of art.
• Essays
• Art
• Art.
• Essays.
• Essais.
• Œuvres d'art.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 117-131) and index.

Contents

Matters of taste : Pieter Aertsen's market scenes, eating habits, and pictorial rhetoric in the sixteenth century / Reindert Falkenburg -- Contemplating Kalf / Anne W. Lowenthal -- Recasting ancestry : statuettes as imaged by three inventors of photography / Julia Ballerini -- The early rack paintings of John F. Peto : "Beneath the nose of the whole world" / Doreen Bolger -- Emblems for a modern age : Vincent van Gogh's still lifes and the nineteenth-century vignette tradition / Petra Ten-Doesschate Chu -- Tom Wesselmann : still-life painting and American culture, circa 1962 / Nan Freeman.

ISBN

• 0691033544
• 9780691033549

LCCN

95045798

OCLC

• ocm33358766
• 33358766
• SCSB-2090013

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library