Significant Objects: The Spell of Still Life explored what curator Gloria Williams Sander identified in the didactic materials attending the exhibition as a long-standing undervaluation of the category. As the introductory wall text explained, still life has often found itself “disparaged critically and theoretically as mere copying that lacked artistic imagination.” Indeed, while superb examples populate nearly every major collection, it remains difficult to imagine a still-life exhibition that could truly be described as a “blockbuster” at most North American museums. This state of affairs owes something to the traditional subordination of still life within the classical hierarchy of genres. Yet, it is the case too that these works often demand careful, visual attention and thrive in intimate and even meditative environments. European still-life paintings were produced, by and large, for the personal (and sometimes obsessive) perusal of their buyers, collectors, and makers. Objects that once hung in carefully selected residential galleries or rested in cabinets of wonder and curiosity can seem ill-suited to the anonymity of the white-walled gallery amid the jostling of fellow visitors. The Norton Simon’s illuminating exhibition, consisting of nearly seventy objects cherry-picked for the occasion, confronted no small task in seeking to bring some of this contemplativeness, room for close looking, and opportunity for considered response into the space of the Pasadena museum. Moreover, through labels and wall text that simultaneously defined, explained, and questioned the category of still life, Williams Sander endeavored both to introduce casual visitors to an oft-overlooked genre and to provide an intervention in curatorial and art-historical evaluations. In melding these disparate but hardly contradictory tasks, Significant Objects proved largely successful.

The exemplars encouraged consideration of the relationship between naturalism, artifice, and the virtuosic products of the human hand. The definition of still life proposed by Williams Sander was expansive, encompassing unquestionable historical masterpieces like Pieter Claesz’s Still Life with Rummer (1645 or 1648) and Jan van Kessel’s delicate oil-on-copper depictions of fruits, birds, and glassware alongside variations and plays on that tradition by cornerstones of modernism including Gustave Courbet, Vincent van Gogh, and Pablo Picasso. Nor were these works limited to the tradition of European painting. Early modern illustrations of botanical specimens shared the galleries with objects often consigned to the decorative arts, and so Rembrandt’s etching of a shell found itself amid Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston’s meditations on photography’s ability to capture nature. Through the variety and thoughtfulness of Williams Sander’s selections, Significant Objects deftly laid before visitors the affinities (and occasionally hostilities) between developing technologies, the goals of naturalism, and the changing formal languages of art. Especially effective was the investigation of abstraction’s impact on a genre that, from its early modern inception, played conspicuously with the boundaries between painterly facture and figuration.

The exhibition space was divided into four large rooms, each devoted to an overarching theme and partitioned loosely from its neighbors, allowing for organic relationships to develop between works displayed on their thresholds. Like the curators’ choice of objects, these headings—“Depiction and Desire,” “Virtuosity,” “Decoding the Still Life,” and “Still Life Off the Table”—were open-ended and capacious.

The first room, “Depiction and Desire,” examined the representation of objects within scientific, technological, and more properly artistic cultures of collecting and display. The enmeshment of early modern art within changing attitudes toward wonder, curiosity, and the natural world has proved an important node of recent art-historical research, and one of the exhibition’s strengths was in acquainting visitors with these vibrant connections between science and the arts (see especially Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Orders of Nature, 1150–1750, New York: Zone Books, 2001; Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004; and Alexander Marr and R. J. W. Evans, eds., Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, Burlington: Ashgate, 2006). Taking center stage were eight anonymous gouache studies from the monumental seventeenth-century Netherlandish Great Tulip Book. These life-size botanical portraits introduced relationships between mimesis and visual knowledge and the collector’s loving and possessive regard for objects. Through their origins in the expanding Dutch commercial empire that made such collecting possible, these only apparently neutral artifacts likewise shed light on the enmeshment of early scientific inquiry in the broader European project of colonialism and expansion (see Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Nearby, Rembrandt’s etching The Shell (Conus Marmoreus) (1650) explored the intersections of collecting nature and collecting art, while artifice and nature similarly complemented one another in the lively consideration of the kinship between mimesis and artistic technology, most effectively explored through Weston’s photographs, objects equally at home in the realm of document and the language of pure form. Not nearly as convincing was the attempt to situate modernist experiments in form within a corollary discourse of knowledge production. The inclusion of Georges Braque’s Still Life with Musical Instruments (1918) as an attempt to depict objects from “multiple perspectives” traded in commonplace clichés regarding the meaning and significance of Cubism.

“Virtuosity,” the second section, provided the most cohesive of these organizing rubrics, in that it posited a connection between finely wrought objects and the consummate skill required in their fashioning—as in the case of Francisco de Zurbarán’s nearly photographic facility with oils displayed in his Still Life with Lemons, Oranges, and a Rose (1633). Likewise, the finesse of Cunningham’s photographs and her desire to present nature as art through the mediation of artisanal technology offered a clear modernist counterpart to the works of Dutch masters displayed in this room including those of Rachel Ruysch and Claesz. The transformation of the artist’s raw materials into the stuff of illusion, the imitation of natural surfaces in radically different media, likewise offered a compelling undercurrent. Aubert-Henri-Joseph Parent’s carved panels of 1789, in which limewood takes on the appearance of hard stone, supple leaves, and rough bark, served as ample demonstration of the heights attainable through human ingenuity and skill.

The third section, “Decoding the Still Life” tackled a perennially vexing problem for students of the genre, one that has haunted scholarship on Dutch still life for decades. In their apparent insistence on the surface of things and their claims to visual facticity, works like Ruysch’s Nosegay on a Marble Plinth (ca. 1695) stubbornly resist the iconographer’s desire to match image with text, subject with meaning. Indeed, since the publication of Svetlana Alpers’s The Art of Describing, art historians have overwhelmingly situated still-life paintings within an explicitly Northern European and usually Netherlandish mode of picturing the world, one that shared both visual effects and representational techniques with mapping and landscape painting (Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983; for the legacy of Alpers’s conception of still life, see esp., Celeste Brusati, “Stilled Lives: Self-Portraiture and Self-Reflection in Seventeenth-Century Netherlandish Still Life Painting,” Simiolus 20 (1990): 168–82; and Elizabeth Alice Honig, “Making Sense of Things: On the Motives of Dutch Still Life,” RES 34 (1998): 166–83). Yet, such purely descriptive painting coexisted in uneasy tension with deeply ingrained symbolic systems, and many of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century works included in Significant Objects deploy such transparent naturalism in the service of complicated, personal, and collective meaning-making.

For example, Jacques Linard’s The Five Senses with Flowers (1639) presented viewers with an arrangement of objects both undeniably mimetic and deeply invested with allegorical and symbolic meaning. At first glance, unbridled description reigns. Light sparkles along the rim of a wineglass and a bursting pomegranate’s blood-red seeds and pulp fade to a dull smudge of rust in the small mirror propped behind. Yet like this fruit in the process of being peeled apart, Linard’s composition is emphatically multilayered. Along with these evident pleasures of sight, delights for each sense emerge. Pomegranate and lemon recall the sweet and sour extremes of taste while the rough and porous skin of the lemon sits beneath the smooth sheen of Chinese porcelain soliciting the viewer’s touch. A delicate ivory flute and a bouquet of flowers point to the music and perfume which must be imaginatively supplied. But the meaning of this painting is hardly exhausted in this allegory of the senses for these commonplace objects were resonant of a deeper truth for their original viewers. The red wine could not help but recall Christ’s sacramental blood while the pomegranate, a potent sign of resurrection since antiquity, served to prefigure the Resurrection in countless devotional works. Linard’s canvas is fully an artist’s attempt to fix the effects of the phenomenal world in oil paint, a rumination on the transience of such phenomena, and a coded (yet instantly recognizable) reminder of the spiritual reality that underlay that transient material for seventeenth-century viewers.

Despite such undeniable insights, the claim presented in the wall label initiating this section “that below the beautiful surface of a depicted object lies an arrangement coded with meaning and symbolism” proves problematic when applied universally. The presumed opposition suggests that meaning lies hidden in these works, obscured by their facture rather than enmeshed in that very process of making. The Five Senses draws its power to transfix the viewer precisely through Linard’s absolutely convincing act of mimesis. For Linard the “truth” of the effects of light and surface are every bit as real (and every bit as false) as those in the world itself. The painting’s meaning arises not from a process of burying or encoding, but rather from the all-too-evident contrast between the constructed nature of the still life, its apparent reality, and the dual nature of its chosen objects as wholly symbolic and entirely the inhabitants of a material world. There was thus something disorienting about the overwhelming presence of descriptive wall labels, especially in this section. The presumption seemed to be that the average viewer required or sought some kind of symbolic resonance, for example, to appreciate Ori Gersht’s monumental Blow Up!: Untitled 4 (2007), a hyperreal study of a nitrogen-frozen floral arrangement at the moment of its explosive destruction. The wall label reported that the photograph served as a rumination on both contemporary terrorist attacks and the French Revolution. This interpretation, the intentionality of the artist notwithstanding, relies frustratingly on an interpretive key that must be imported by the enlightened viewer rather than from visual engagement with the photograph.

For all its capaciousness, the exhibition was at its best when it did not stretch the limits of the genre too far beyond its historical parameters. As such, the final themed section, “Still Life Off the Table,” was a bit more hit and miss than its predecessors. On the one hand, remarkable modernist forays by Picasso and Édouard Manet provided an important counterpoint to the inherent mimesis of the genre’s classical incarnation. Manet’s Still Life with Fish and Shrimp (1864) focuses unprecedented scrutiny on replication of nature through the language of painting. Joseph Cornell’s Hotel du Nord (Little Dürer) (ca. 1950) recalls the cabinets of curiosity so prominent in still life’s original environment and provides a bookend to the exhibition’s ongoing conversations on art and science. On the other hand, Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise (1941–42), a work that cannot really be thought of as organically related to the conventions or aims of still life, felt unmoored here. That canonical monuments of Pop art on display engaged thoughtfully with the significance of objects is beyond doubt. The extent, however, to which either Warhol’s Val Vita Tomatoes with Puree (ca. 1975) or Oldenberg’s Giant Soft Ketchup Bottle with Ketchup (1966–67) can be said to meaningfully engage with the tradition of still life was—to this reviewer—questionable. The presentation of isolated products of mass production, isolated from their relationship with other objects and fabricated using processes and materials of commercial rather than artisanal manufacture, seemed rather to travesty than to preserve the legacy of still life. (Williams Sander is hardly alone in finding the connections between Pop art and still life salient, however. This supposed kinship has found a popular mouthpiece, most recently in John Wilmerding’s The Pop Object: The Still Life Tradition in Pop Art [New York: Rizzoli, 2013].)

This is not so say that Significant Objects only succeeded when it was wholly traditional in its definitions of and approach to its topic. Gersht’s large-format photograph Blow Up! rewarded the same sort of close attention as the canonical Dutch material on display, prompting viewers to consider the limits of naturalism and the mimetic aspirations of art making while offering a sly nod to what photographic technology does and does not make possible. In a rather different register, Claudio Bravo’s pastel Still Life (1981)—surely the most pivotal of works borrowed for the exhibition—quietly demonstrated the continued purchase of things wrought purely through the intersection of the eye and the hand. The painting’s delight in the porous skin of mandarin oranges as well as the minute reflections off the surface of the enameled bowl in which they rest overwhelm any desire to decode and resist consignment to past tradition. The prominent inclusion of these works by Bravo and Gersht spoke not so much to the afterlife of the genre as to its ongoing vitality.

Significant Objects is an exhibition that could only be conceived, I suspect, in a collection as universally strong as that of the Norton Simon. Though a number of pivotal loans (from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Getty Museum, notably) provided additional breadth, the chronological and geographic range of the Norton Simon’s holdings was everywhere evident. Moreover, for an exhibition of this sort to truly succeed each work must reward the sustained attention of the viewer, and it is here, above all, that the exhibition excelled. The objects on display were significant ones, and the same modesty of scale that allowed for a meaningful encounter with these works left me wanting just a bit more.