Still Life: Ordinary Pleasures

Still Life: Ordinary Pleasures explores one of art’s most fundamental genres through paintings by Elena Climent, Georgia O’Keeffe, Pablo Picasso, Odilon Redon, Helen Torr, and others.​

Poet Mark Doty observed that “in a still life, there is no end to our looking, we look in and in…. as long as we can stand to look, as long as we take pleasure in looking.”

One of the most fundamental of artistic genres, the still life remains a staple of beginning art classes. When Elaine Fried arrived at Willem De Kooning’s studio in 1938 for her first private lesson, he set up a grouping of ordinary objects, including a coffee pot, a large shell, a yellow cup, a blue cotton shirt, and an army blanket. She painted these compositions for months and found the experience to be transformative. “I really felt as though I could spend my entire life painting still lifes and express everything I wanted to express through them,” declared Fried.

For artists, still life “models” are both handy and free ways to explore spatial relationships. For viewers, the intimate scale of a tableau of inanimate objects reward the process of looking and observing.

Still Life: Ordinary Pleasures showcases still-life paintings from the Museum’s American, Latin American, and European art collections. Featured works of fruit, flowers, and other domestic objects include those by Elena Climent, Georgia O’Keeffe, Pablo Picasso, Odilon Redon, Helen Torr, and others.

Credit: Overview from museum website