THINKING ON A TABLETOP

JEAN-SIMEON CHARDIN, STILL LIFE WITH PLUMS, ca.1730

(Frick Collection, New York)

What’s so mysterious about a pile of plums, a couple of cucumbers, a glass of water and an old black bottle? What’s so interesting about them? Why, in a room dominated by a huge Claude Lorraine landscape and boasting important works by Van Dyck, David and Whistler, do I spend most of my time in front of this small canvas showing these ordinary objects arranged on a spartan stone shelf against an indeterminate background? It is a long-standing critical cliche to see Chardin as the anti-Boucher, the anti-Fragonard, and a visit to the Frick Collection, where one can see large decorative ensembles by both Rococo masters (installed, appropriately, on the opposite side of the house from the Chardin), only confirms this judgment. In an age of flower-strewn aristocratic decoration, Chardin was the odd man out (even though his works were also avidly collected by aristocrats). His best still lifes have a minimal, seemingly puritanical simplicity, evoking the plainness of Protestant churches and bourgeois morality. But let’s not get carried away by comparisons with the rest of the Rococo period. The beauty that stretches from floor to ceiling in Frick’s Fragonard room is in a different category from that found in the Chardin, but there is beauty in this small canvas nonetheless–even a kind of hedonism. There is the palpable, smooth darkness of the plums contrasting with the cucumbers’ bright roughness; there is the light that breaks up into a luminous, powdery haze as it passes through the water glass; there are the dramatic white-on-black highlights punched onto the body of the bottle and dragged gorgeously along its neck. And just as there is beauty in Chardin’s plainness, a great complexity underlies his apparent simplicity. Like the glass of water so prominently featured here, Chardin’s painting only seems transparent; his clarity is an elaborate ruse concealing the calculated, deliberate work that lies behind.

Like every great still life, this Chardin is all about balance. From the paintings of Juan Sanchez Cotan in El Greco’s Spain to those of Giorgio Morandi in twentieth-century Italy, still life has concerned itself with achieving balance and unity through the careful arrangement of disparate objects. E Pluribus Unum could be the genre’s motto. On first glance, the Frick Chardin seems balanced and stable enough, but upon closer examination we begin to notice the anomalies, and after a while we wonder how this composition can hold together at all. The cucumbers and glass of water on the right are much larger and heavier than those plums on the left. There is no form on the left to balance that big cucumber that seems to launch itself into space like an ungainly, bulbous rocket. The bottle, which by virtue of size and color could be a massive, monumental stabilizer, is weakened because its contour is broken by the glass. Strangest of all, the ledge that holds these objects is noticeably sloped, tilting downward to the left. Even Chardin’s signature, painted as though carved into the edge of the shelf at right, is clearly tilted. This last detail suggests careful deliberation and tells us that nothing in this painting is mistaken or accidental, that those elements which seem most arbitrary must be part of some elaborate strategy to balance and harmonize the entire composition. The centrality of the bottle encourages us to see this painting in terms of a balance scale with two pans, the kind held by effigies of Justice and Vermeer’s Woman with a Balance. If we imaginatively hold Chardin’s composition by the neck of the bottle, we find that the left side lies lower in the balance and thus reads as ‘heavier’ than the objectively more weighty right side. The plums appear–irrationally, almost magically–heavier than the cucumbers because they weigh the entire painting down on the left. The tilting shelf that accounts for this perception is countered by the downward angle of the cucumbers–especially the top one, the aerobatic weightlessness of which also adds a note of lightness to the painting’s right half. While the low basket of plums tilts downward, following the slope of the shelf, the central bottle and glass tilt either very slightly or not at all, and the cucumbers are of course arranged at an angle opposite to that of the shelf–all of which creates an unexpected overall balance in this asymmetrical work. The placement of the glass of water is also a balancing strategy. By interrupting the contours of both cucumbers and the bottle, the glass ‘opens’ these large, closed forms and dissolves a part of their mass in the play of refraction, thus making the right side appear–yet again–less weighty than it is.

To see how well Chardin’s balancing strategies work in this painting, we need only compare it to a slightly earlier still life in the Louvre featuring a large wicker basket of fruit, the same black bottle and a silver goblet that appears frequently in Chardin’s work. In the Louvre canvas the shelf is similarly tilted, but the composition’s stability is fatally compromised by Chardin’s placement of the big, heavy basket on the left side with no object of comparable mass to counter it on the right. The entire composition is therefore overloaded in the direction of the tilt, and everything seems on the verge of sliding noisily off of the shelf. In the Frick painting, by contrast, the leftward drift of objects–and the viewer’s eye–is checked by the single plum in the foreground and the notch in the shelf at left. The plum slows our eye down and the notch stops it, leading us back up toward the piled plums and into the composition. By the time Chardin painted this still life (just two to four years after the Louvre canvas) he was a cannier and more subtle artist.

In addition to his complex system of checks and balances (a typically eighteenth-century way to build things, from paintings to governments), Chardin unifies the Frick canvas with a series of formal rhymes and harmonies. The curve of the upper cucumber is twinned by the bottle’s convex curve and complemented by the concave one at the base of the bottle’s neck. The curves of the bottle are similarly echoed by the rounded plums. The oval top of the glass rhymes with the smaller oval opening atop the bottle, while the oval’s elongation suggests the shape of the cucumbers. And all the objects in the painting are united by reflection on the surface of the black bottle: the cucumber’s distorted image is visible at right; a small touch of blue paint at the bottle’s left edge signifies the plums; the water glass appears in ghostly reflection on the bottle’s body. Even the white highlights on the bottle are a unifying factor. In addition to rhyming with the highlights on the other forms, they signify the painting’s ultimate unifying force, the sunlight that comes through Chardin’s studio window and makes all these objects visible.

Everything is united in the bottle. Let’s look at the painting and think about that. Cucumbers are united with plums: a solid, rough, elongated form is united with a soft, smooth, curving one... "Dr. Freud to the Frick Collection, stat." No great imaginative leap is required to see the sexual symbolism in this painting. The cucumbers are clearly phallic–one of them is even erect. The plums, with their feminine curves and pronounced indentations, just as clearly suggest female sex organs. The bottle, joining a rounded body to a phallic neck, is a unification of the two forms, a symbol of sexual union. And the glass of water can also be interpreted sexually: water is life, and sex, the origin of life, is a matter of liquids. Probably unique among Chardin’s still lifes, this work is a visual erotic poem. It is an exception, but it should still give pause to scholars who insist upon the chastity and sexlessness of Chardin’s oeuvre. The Frick canvas clearly displays a Chardinesque eroticism that is plainer and more serious than the idealized, softly lighted romps of his Rococo contemporaries. It has an older, more Baroque air, closer in spirit to the erotic poems of John Donne, with their elaborate sexual metaphors. Chardin is also surprisingly clear about the bodily reality of the sexual act, its power differentials and implied violence (note how the upper cucumber seems to rise threateningly toward the plums–a note of domination, a little S-M on the produce counter). The work’s overall composition even suggests the opposition between traditional (and traditionally sexist) male and female attributes: the architectonic, triangular composition of the right half is contrasted with the organic, haphazard-looking left side to evoke the polarity of orderly male reason versus natural female instinct. And this duality, too, is united in the bottle: its sinuous right side adds a note of curvature to the rectilinear male half of the painting, while the unbroken contour of its left side provides a vertical accent amidst the sensual roundness of the plums.

But I won’t pretend that this erotic interpretation is some ‘abracadabra’ that lays bare all the painting’s secrets. We haven’t come to the end; we’re probably not even close. The greatest works of art elude interpretive capture. When we think we’ve grasped them, they shift, show another aspect, and slip through our fingers like water. Speaking of which, consider the refractive distortions caused by the water in Chardin’s glass. We know that the lower edge of the bottle and the rest of the cucumber continue behind the watery blur. But since we can’t see them, how do we know? There is a discrepancy here between perception and intellect, between what we know in our minds and what we can see with our eyes. Chardin’s fidelity to perceived reality paradoxically causes us to doubt the fidelity of our perceptions, to doubt the reliability of knowledge gained through the senses. The kind of epistemological doubt that leads to the broken contours and complex perspectives of late Cézanne and culminates in the multiple views of Cubism begins here, in this passage as subtle as silence. Chardin gives us an unsettling intimation that our perceptions may have the same relation to reality as the bottle’s distorted reflection of the cucumber has to the actual painted vegetable. A small crack opens here (as early as 1730) in the discourse of observation that underlies the entire scientific-rationalist worldview; within two centuries the structure will be shaken by quantum uncertainty, and painting will be turned inside out.

Still we haven’t come to the bottom of things. Mysteries abound. Why are a single plum and a glass of water given equal emphasis in the foreground–forced to rhyme, as it were? They are the only two objects shown complete, their contours uninterrupted, and their cast shadows strongly rhyme on the shelf. What can they possibly have in common? The glass, as we have seen, is a transparent thing that obscures the objects behind it; the plum likewise contains unexpected mystery: the hard stone at the center of its sweet softness. As my gaze travels back and forth between glass and plum, it passes over the bottle. Maybe this black bottle–not entirely opaque, but difficult to see through–is placed here in the middle as a symbol of the mystery at the heart of the work, the secrets its dark center won’t give up. And maybe this is Chardin’s whole point: to find beauty and mystery in the most ordinary things and poetry in the everyday. (This must be what drew Proust to Chardin.) We can say with certainty that there is no meaning in the painting beyond its materials, beyond these objects and what their forms and placement suggest. (Even as I write this I think that the same can probably be said of any painting.) What they suggest to me, ultimately, is their own unknowableness. In such simple objects, depths that cannot be sounded. Suddenly we are alienated from ordinary things, and it’s as if we’ve never seen a plum or a glass of water or a bottle until Chardin shows it to us. The Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation must be the type of all such poetic transformations. Bread becomes body, wine becomes blood; transcendental mystery is imputed to ordinary things. In Chardin, we have the mystery without transcendence. This may be the painter’s greatest conceptual feat, his little artistic revolution: to take the aura that surrounds the ritual objects of the Mass and impute it to any object of his choice, to make a cucumber as sacred as the Host, a glass of water as powerful as holy wine. All the items in his best still lifes are like objects in a ritual only Chardin understands. In the Frick canvas, the painter of the sentimentally pious Saying Grace makes no concessions to Christianity. Here the only religion is art, and this is its altar.

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