Unexpected twists

As a teenager in Cambridge, I used to have tea with a blind philosopher. One afternoon, spotting the sugar lurking behind the milk, I told it — as one does — to come out from there. My friend was aghast. ‘Are you talking to the crockery?’ he asked. Ontologically speaking, of course, I was on shaky ground, but there was an empirical logic to my remark which was lost on him. A blind man can apprehend objects in space, but not the spatial relationships between them.

I’d forgotten this incident until the Estorick Collection’s new exhibition Still Life in 20th Century Italy brought it back, setting me thinking about the nature of ‘natura morta’. Traditionally, still-life painting works on two levels: the superficial level of surface illusion and the deeper level of symbolic meaning. In the early days of vanitas painting, the ‘deeper’ meaning was imposed by artists anxious to give the genre importance, but as the artists themselves grew in importance the imposition stopped being necessary. By Cézanne’s day, artists could drop the pretence that still life was about either illusion or symbolism and admit what they had really known all along, that it was about the relationships between things.

By the following century, the Cubists were in a position to shatter the traditional still life and reconstruct it for the modern era. In Italy, though, the Futurists were unconvinced. As late as 1913 Gino Severini clung to the view that, as far as his compatriots were concerned, ‘Heavy, powerful motor-cars, dancers reflected in the fairy ambience of light and colour, aeroplanes flying above the heads of an excited throng…satisfy our sense of a lyrical and dramatic universe better than do two pears and an apple.’ His point was wittily illustrated in Alfredo Ambrosi’s 1939 painting, ‘Passéism and Futurism’, showing two planes swooping dramatically over an Italian valley on the edge of which, stranded on a fractured ledge, sit a bust, a fish, an onion and a carrot.