Poetics of Still Life: A Collage by Robert Vas Dias
2022; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 43; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/abr.2022.0119
ISSN2153-4578
Autores Tópico(s)Public Spaces through Art
ResumoReviewed by: Poetics of Still Life: A Collage by Robert Vas Dias Stephanie Rauschenbusch (bio) poetics of still life: a collage Robert Vas Dias Permanent Press https://www.permanentpress.co.uk/publications.html 156 pages; Print, $35.00 Robert Vas Dias's Poetics of Still Life: A Collage is a most endearing book, full of well-printed images of still life paintings along with a mélange of texts about the works and an occasional simple ekphrastic poem by Vas Dias himself. He is the author of seventeen books of poetry, nine of which involved collaboration with visual artists. The quotations are from art historians and poets, and are enlightening. Best of all, Vas Dias has chosen most of my favorite still life painters for this book; even better, he has chosen the very painting I would have listed as my favorite. For example, the Velázquez painting Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Mary and Martha from 1618, which hangs in the National Gallery in London, shows us two kitchen workers, one young and one old, in the foreground, with eggs and fish on the table. The younger worker has reddened hands and reddened cheeks. In a square in the background, seen as a window in the kitchen, is a scene of Jesus teaching Mary and Martha. The fish gleam silver and white, as do the eggs and the headdresses of the two women. This painting harks back to Joachim Beuckelaer's The Well-Stocked Kitchen with Jesus in the House of Martha and Mary in the Background of 1566, which hangs in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Here the foreground overflows with four kitchen workers and every possible dead animal and bird, while in the background is the same small, distant room with the religious scene. It is not unusual to see in Flemish paintings, even landscapes by painters like Paul Bril, a tiny "Road to Emmaus" or "Rest on the Flight into Egypt." [End Page 182] In his prologue, Vas Dias explains how he became interested in still life: It was an exhibition of Morandi's still lifes I saw in Paris in 1979 … that first obsessed me. He sometimes spent weeks collecting, even painting the objects themselves, arranging and re-arranging them on an old table in his bedroom studio before painting them on canvas in a single day. When it comes to choosing images to represent Morandi, Vas Dias chooses two wonderful etchings that do not exhibit Morandi's most compelling aspect—the changing colors he exacted from identical objects in different paintings. His work is full of Platonic forms and mysterious objects, including a childhood toy ball. Along with the image of a Meléndez painting called Still Life with Salmon, Lemon, and Three Vessels from 1772, now hanging in the Prado, Vas Dias gives us a tiny history of Meléndez's choice of still life when he is "cut off from royal commissions as a court painter" because of his own father's career-destroying denunciation of the directors of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Meléndez completes forty-four exquisite still life paintings before he is stopped by a financial dispute. The salmon in this painting is something sublime. Vas Dias calls Meléndez "the unsung hero of still life." He is a Spanish painter, while Josefa de Óbidos is Portuguese. Her Still Life with Cakes (1660–70) decorates the cover of Vas Dias's book. Other female still life painters included in this book are Clara Peeters (Still Life with Cheeses, Almonds and Pretzels, 1615) and Anne Vallayer-Coster, a member of the French Academy, whose painting of mackerel and lemons on a well-set table inspires Vas Dias with a nutritionist's poem with lines like "Anne, did you know that fatty fish / contains high amounts / of omega-3 fatty acids?" As to Adriaen Coorte's 1697 watercolor of asparagus in a bunch, Vas Dias waxes autobiographical: I am told that in northern France asparagus is served with hollandaise. In southern France asparagus is served with vinaigrette. My mother served asparagus with melted butter, chopped hardboiled eggs, and lemon, which is how she learned to do it...
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