Walk: JCCSF, T. Joe's
Distance: 3 miles and yoga class
Abraham van Beyeren (Dutch, 1620-90), Still Life, 1666, 55 x 45 7/8", oil on canvas (Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco)
It's the time of year when Ciwt comes home from the market with bags bursting with comfort food. Which today puts her in mind of those burgeoning banquet feast tables painted often by Dutch baroque artists. Seemingly straight forward and exquisitely executed, the Banquet Pieces were also complex morality tales. This duality - celebration of enormous prosperity combined with reminders that riches are vain and fleeting - suited the pious Calvinistic Dutch need to reconcile their new, celebratory acquisitiveness with their religious disdain for ostentation.
Another name given to these still lifes is 'vanitas' paintings. In the painting above the table is covered with delicacies from all of the world and is evidence of the truly incredible wealth the Dutch were experiencing after their freedom from Spain. (In their Golden Era, the Dutch were the richest economy in the history of the world, before of after). Yet the painting contains multiple 'vanitas' s- or
memento mori,(translation: Remember that you can die) symbols including
: the pocket watch representing the passing of time, the empty glass, the plate sitting precariously at the table's which could fall at any time.
For a larger clearer look at van Beyeren's painting, this link will take you to the Legion's collection. For those with a bit more interest in the art of the Dutch Golden Era and the painting above, Ciwt once wrote a paper as follows.
N.B. before leaving: Like all things, Ciwt's comfort food bonanza usually vanishes with the end of the darker, colder, holiday season.
During the later 17th
Century when this painting was executed the Dutch had freed themselves from
Spanish rule and also become a preeminent banking and naval power with trade
routes and colonies extending into Asia and the New World. Art flourished in this wealthy,
self-confident environment free from the constraints of Catholic Church
patronage and was highly prized by a rising and justifiably acquisitive middle
class. But this new mercantile, banking
and seafaring bourgeoisie was also largely Calvinist Protestant and rigidly
tempered by religious and moralistic disdain for ostentation. Perhaps to reconcile the two conflicting
mindsets – materialistic exuberance and religious piety - Dutch collectors came
to favor low-key works – portraits, landscapes, seascapes and still lifes such
as this work. Artists began increasingly to specialize in certain types of
work, as van Beyeren did, first in fish portraits and later in sumptuous
banquet paintings or pronks.
Among Dutch still lifes a
subgenre flourished in the early to late 17th century (the time of
this painting) again tempered by Calvinisn.
Known as vanitas paintings,
these still lives included collections of objects symbolizing the inevitability
of death and the transience of earthly achievements and pleasures. Known as momento
mori (reminders of death) the objects are often placed amidst the
sumptuousness and splendor of exquisite material and natural objects as they
are in this masterful van Beyeren Still
Life.
Van Beyeren was extensively
trained in guilds of The Hague, his native city,
and Amsterdam
among other Dutch venues. His
painterly skills are fully honed by the time of this later vanitas. Witness the
beautifully rendered Delft
bowl, the glass decanter and pedestal plate, the exquisite silver fish
platters, the succulent peaches, the rich, flounced satin tablecloth, gold
trimmed and shimmering in the artful light.
But the materialistic swoon
is jarred by a disproportionately large, vividly orange lobster which makes
multiple references. The lobster is a
complex sea creature, hard, crusty, dangerously clawed on the outside with
insides that are sweet, succulent and easily perishable. As such the lobster begins to shift the
viewer’s mind toward the more complicated momento
mori objects and to toward
essences rather than surfaces. There is
a half-eaten peach, a peeled lemon, a used napkin, a rather dilapidated ribbon,
and, most especially and directly in front of the lobster’s fixated eye and
pincer, an open and presumably ticking timepiece. Somebody has been here and is now gone, the
fruit will rot, the bread will go stale, that which is momentarily brilliant in
the intensely highlighted foreground is weighted toward the edge of the table
with the suggestion that it is destined to fall again into the dark from which
it emerged.
Indeed the overall
composition of the still life speaks of time passing. Beginning from the dark left corner of the
table to the highlighted cantaloupe just above the right midline there is a upward and right moving diagonal
which captures the momentary exuberance of the rapid Dutch economic ascent
. But virtually the entire rest of the
painting opposes this upward thrust from the massive, murky upper section and
to the smaller but similarly dark passage that comprises the lower part of the
painting. The objects on the table are
unstable: they are tipped sideways like the Delft bowl or spilling forward like the
grapes, the dilapidated ribbon, the used napkin, and most poignantly the
lobster’s largest claw. These over hang
to the extent we are no longer sure just where the front edge of the table is.
The soft, billowy grey tablecloth will not support weight and begins to
transmute into a sort of shroud toward which all the objects are moving. In
fact, the entire weight of the painting is moving forward toward the viewer and
he or she is included in this inexorable passage from the dark into the light
and then back into the dark. Momento mori: Ashes to ashes; dust to
dust.
Many of van Beyeren’s
techniques foreshadow modernism: the washy, impressionist brushstrokes of the
background, the bravura, mildly tenebrist lighting and especially the
cubist-like perspective. Although not
always to the liking of the conservative, realistically minded bourgeoisie of
his era and therefore less famous than some of his artistic contemporaries, we
begin to see why van Beyeren is now considered one of the most talented Dutch
still life painters of the second half of the 17th Century.
That, of course, would be 
.
. Maybe because desert air is so clear; Ciwt's brain felt completely open and like she could sense the space from coast to coast. 
Different from ofttimes being nearly on red alert living - especially driving - in the Bay Area. How to explain? Oh, well, maybe she'll figure that out manana...
where she's been a few times years ago - but is heading for soon - she almost forgot CIWT. Mum's the word though because she hasn't told Callie. Stay tuned....
And in even greater part for Ciwt to the entire movie being shot in historic, sumptuous, beautiful Italian locations: Racanati, Florence, Naples. 
.