Chamber Music

One reason why artists like to do still lifes is because they are the easiest kind of painting. Models that stay put are a big help; and such typical still life subjects as apples, books, pipes, when carefully copied, have a kind of teasing charm--like candy in a showcase. But the champions of still life, from Memling* to Picasso, have found its very simplicity a challenge.

Professional artists have sometimes met that challenge by reducing realism to photographic limits; amateurs have generally chosen an easier way out, painting unconsciously formalized, decorative interpretations of their subjects. Both methods are discussed, and well illustrated with 134 examples, in a first-rate history published this week: Wolfgang Bern's Still-Life Painting in America (Oxford; $7.50).

Economical Devotion. Munich-and Vienna-trained Scholar Born, who has lived in the U.S. since 1937, admits that U.S. still-life painting is only "a humble annex to the art of the world," but he thinks it has its charms. "Still life," he says, "is the chamber music of painting. ... It manifests the intrinsic values of art, very little diluted by incidental elements."

The muted chamber music produced by Philadelphia's Raphaelle Peale, one of the two best U.S. still-life painters, was almost neurotically strict. He was born into a painting family in 1774; his father and uncle were both artists, and his brother Rembrandt won lasting fame as a portrait painter. Peale, who became a heavy drinker, was ill most of his sober hours, and Author Born thinks that this may have helped him as a painter. Sickness, he reasons, "may become a constructive element in so far as it forces the artist to be more direct, more concise and more economical in his style."

Peale's economy consisted in devoting all his limited strength to the narrowest possible problems. His masterpiece, After the Bath, painted two years before he died in 1825, is a bath towel hanging on a line.

Humanized Mechanization. The only U.S. artist to rival Peale's mastery of still life was an Irishman named William M. Harnett. As sickly as Peale, Harnett was also dirt-poor to start with, took to painting still lifes because he could not afford live models. He made his dead models--rabbits, books, fruit, paper money--so convincing that guards were once posted to protect his canvases from clutching gallerygoers.

Harnett's realism created a short-lived fashion; his prices rose to $2,000 a picture before he died in 1892, then dropped abruptly. A bachelor recluse, he is known to have granted only one interview, in the course of which he made a puzzling statement: "I do not closely imitate nature."

Author Born sees a new trend, "precisionism," in modern U.S. still life. To his taste, the best living still-lifer in the U.S. is Charles Sheeler, a precisionist who likes painting machines and whose machine-smooth technique often looks as slick as a glossy photograph. "Sheeler's interpretation of the machine," writes Born, "in all its apparent austerity, is ... mechanization . . . humanized. Hence he not only forms the zenith of a development but also points the way to a new goal." That sounded rather like a plastic apple arc-welded to a bulletproof dish--and it did not sound much like chamber music.

*The 15th Century Flemish master whose wild-flower bouquet, painted for amusement on the back of a portrait canvas, was the first known still life.

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