Travel season is fledging so it’s taking me both hands to count the number of people I know who are embarking to Italy, London or New York, the Yucatan and Brazil. Wherever they’re going, almost all of them are hungry for some kind of art they can’t get at home. Paintings are at the top of the list.
One of the most common genres we all identify painting with, at least in the traditional sense, is still life, and a huge component of that is food. Whether it’s Cezanne’s "Still Life with Apples and Oranges", one of the Dutch masters’ portrayals of crabs and fish still wet from the boat, or a Chinese water colour of persimmons, the still life — and food — are thoroughly stuck in the canon of art.
Even today they won’t go away, though subject matter and approach have evolved. Beyond Warhol and his Cream of Mushroom soup, witness Wayne Thiebaud’s acrobatic "Display Cakes" balancing on sticks in a cartoon confectionland, or Tom Wesselmann’s "Still Life no. 24", giving Wish-Bone Italian Salad Dressing, a cob of corn and a pack of Tareyton smokes iconic status.
An ironic favorite, more to do with the everyday aftermath of eating food than with food itself, is "Odol", a two-foot homage Stuart Davis painted in 1924 to Odol mouthwash. The odd bottle with a crooked neck looks more like the contemporary "duck" toilet bowl cleaner than a bottle of mouthwash.
So where did this marriage of food and art come from?
No surprise, given how quintessential food is to life, that the earliest paintings dating back to prehistoric times some 10,000 or 15,000 years ago contain images of food — wild yams, plants and animals that were hunted and eaten.
More interesting, perhaps, is the fact that the opportunity and initiative to make art were pretty much dependent on the evolution of food procurement. Painting on the walls of caves or cliffs (and other art-making) only happened after prehistoric peoples figured out how to join forces and herd animals into pits to kill them.
Naturally, this type of methodical hunting took more effort and organization than killing animals one at a time. Making images of the hunt helped the group effort both through explanation and ritualization. Nothing like getting the buffalo, I mean people, all heading west by getting them psyched up beforehand.
In turn, collaborative hunting efforts meant larger returns to the larder. With more food stockpiled, our ancient ancestors could stay in one spot longer and, with more time, could let loose their imaginations and produce more art.
You could argue that these early paintings weren’t really still lifes, as they usually depicted animals on the run. But they were all about food — and some of them definitely look like animals that have been already rendered "still" for future dinners.
The idea of using really still life — as in flowers, copper pots or dead fish, or a sombre lemon or two — didn’t really become popular in European painting until the 1600s.
The "first" Euro-based still life is generally credited to Jacopo de’Barbari, who painted "Dead Bird" in 1504, about a century before the big still life trend caught on in Western Europe. The painting (you can see it in Munich), echoes those early Paleolithic images of animals, likely stemming from a similar mix of reverence and importance mixed with opportunism — it’s simply what’s around to paint.
While the Asians were far out front of the Europeans in creating still lifes, this choice for artists anywhere is pretty obvious. The subject material is always handy, even to the poorest painter; it doesn’t move around restlessly while you’re trying to paint or sketch it; and it’s loaded with all kinds of symbolism and associated meaning that make for a suitable study.
Some of the most striking — and arguably tackiest — uses of food motifs in art were done by one Giuseppe Arcimboldo, a 14th century Milanese painter who specialized in social satire.
No one was above his reproaches against war, the misuse of power and indulgences of the elite as Arcimboldo portrayed them in his grotesque compositions (here "grotesque" has a very specific meaning, referring to the ornamentation used by Romans in buildings called grotte , where floral motifs, animals, human forms and masks were common).
Arcimboldo created human forms out of all sorts of things including books, guns, candles, sea creatures and assorted bric-a-brac near and dear to aristocratic hearts of the day. These mocking portraits parodied the serious ones favoured by the social climbers and ruling classes that Arcimboldo would have rubbed shoulders with during his career, first in Milan, where he designed the windows for the huge cathedral, and later in Prague as court painter for two emperors.
He is likely best known for his satirical portraits named for the seasons — "Spring", "Summer", "Autumn" and "Winter", which you can see in the Louvre in Paris. Each is a surreal portrait in profile of a man or woman whose head is composed entirely of fruits, vegetables and vegetation.
"Winter" is a gnarly old thing, with a wizened face of bark, two giant lips of fungus and an odd broach with a lemon and pear protruding from a twig at his throat. "Spring" is a rather sweet, matronly woman made entirely of flowers, a string of pearls at her neck.
"Autumn" pays homage to harvest and winemaking, with a millet-bearded fellow with a neck of squash and carrots, a big fat potato nose, a mushroom ear and a prickly, half-open horse chestnut mouth. "Summer" — likely Arcimboldo’s best-known work — is a full-on homage to succulent food. It shows a wild-eyed fellow with a zucchini for a nose, a big ripe peach for a cheek, a pod of peas for his toothy grin and a tangle of plums, berries, cherries and leaves for his hair.
While the surrealists like Salvador Dali and company later fully embraced the concept of visual punning and gave Arcimboldo his due, his grotesque portraits were generally dismissed during his time as mere curiosities — ones in very poor taste, a pun which must have sent his critics into hysterics.
Arcimboldo’s reputation has since been further resuscitated. His strange food figures appear on contemporary book covers and the like, still proving that food and art is an irresistible combination.
Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who has had more than one pear rot on her study table because she took so long to paint it.
