All language subtitles for Apples Pears and Paint How to Make a Still Life Painting BBC 720p HDTV x264 AC3 EN Sub_Subtitles01.UND

One thing modern life is not
short of is imagery.

We are bombarded by the fast-cut,

quick-moving symbols of advertising
and media.

It's everywhere we look.

But the story of still life is
not about looking,

it's about seeing.

Still life asks us to stop
and consider the world anew.

Our impulse to take pleasure in the
simple things of everyday life

stretches back into
the depth of time.

Throughout history, artists have
used still life to help us

understand the beauty of nature...

..and value the material world
we have created around us.

The story of still life is an
astonishing tale

of how the depiction
of humble things

was relegated to the bottom
of art's hierarchy...

..yet rose to play the key role

in some of art's
most revolutionary moments.

And today,
it lives on in unexpected ways.

Almost anything has got
aesthetic qualities.

There are many more
beautiful things than

we give credence
to in our day-to-day lives.

When we think about what
happiness really entails,

it often is about an appreciation
of the moment,

and of things that are right
in front of our eyes,

and things that are, in a way,
quite ordinary.

And still life helps us with that.

In a way, still life is the most
demanding genre of art to take

seriously because it doesn't have any
of the obvious signs of importance.

How artists depict the world helps us
to decide what

we think of as valuable,
and what we neglect and demean.

The story of this intriguing genre
is intertwined with religion,

politics and wealth.

Depicting a mere object might
seem the simplest

and most obvious form of art.

But it's a practice
the greatest names

have always been drawn towards.

But how do you define it?

What actually constitutes
a work of still life?

The four basic elements that
an artist is going to be

looking for when they are composing
a still life is that, first,

they are going to choose
their objects,

then they are going to place them
in space -

because the space is
just as important as the object,

and then they are going to
consider their lighting,

and last of all, they will
think about the framing, how the

total composition actually works
within the height

and width of the finished image.

It's a painting of everything
within arm's reach.

It's everything that's touchable,

it's everything that you could
lift with your hand.

It's about a manual,
and gestural space.

One peculiarity of still life
painting is that, by and large,

the world stops at the far
edge of the table, it just ends.

You do not even ask why. It is
so cleverly done, you don't

even think...
"They're censoring this,

"what have they got
beyond the table?"

It's far more interested
in the tactile world,

and the interplay between things
that you... Dare I touch this glass?

Things that you lift
and are used to, and you get

so used to that you don't see them
any more.

So, one of the things that European
still life gets into is,

supposing this is about the objects
that are so familiar

and everyone's got them, so much
so that you never look at them.

It's a sort of re-enchantment
of the things that are overlooked,

that are so taken for granted
that you don't see them any more.

Well, literally,
a still life painting is

a painting of inanimate objects,
but it clearly is not adequate

because any still life painting
from the middle of the 17th century

is likely to have beetles and bugs
and snails and live animals

so the term itself
is only approximate.

During the Italian Renaissance,

the ancient city of Milan was one of
the world's key centres of art

and learning. Among the many
treasures still to be found here

is one deceptively simple
painting that is of vital

importance in the story
of still life.

We are in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana.

Its origins go back to the donation
made by Cardinal Federico Borromeo

in 1618 when he decided to donate
his private collection

in 1618 when he decided to donate
his private collection

to the Ambrosiana,

thus founding the oldest
museum in Milan.

Although the collection is not
a huge collection as such,

nevertheless, we have amazing
masterpieces.

The Pinacoteca has
many very important masterpieces

but definitely, there is
one which deserves special attention.

Here is the famous basket of fruit
by Caravaggio

which is surely one of the most
important pieces of our collection.

The painting is one of the most
fascinating, beautiful,

enigmatic, important works of art,
not only in the history

of still life painting
but in the whole of European art.

It looks, for all the world,
like a commonplace basket of fruit,

and yet it is painted with a
realism, with an intensity,

a sense of detail, and immediacy
that certainly is unparalleled.

And historically, of course,
in this painting, Caravaggio has

painted the very first known still
life painting of a basket of fruit.

When this work was first created,
the people at that time had never

seen anything like it.

The basket of fruit is recognised

as the first major work of Western
still life.

as the first major work of Western
still life.

It was painted
in 1596 by the infamous artist,

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.

And by doing something seemingly
obvious as depicting a simple

basket of fruit, Caravaggio had
written a new chapter

in art history.

Caravaggio was a rather dark
character, very ambitious

and when he was 21 he paints
his only still life painting.

It's a basket of fruit that wants
to be something else.

It wants to be a painting
about life and death,

and resurrection and salvation and
whether you can achieve such a thing.

Caravaggio is a man full of doubt

and I think that
doubt is in that painting.

The forms that he makes are all
extremely imperfect.

There isn't anything that hasn't
been ravaged by a worm or a bug

There isn't anything that hasn't
been ravaged by a worm or a bug

or some kind of foliage disease
because Caravaggio loves things

when they are imperfect and damaged.

The symbolism in the painting is
quite highly charged.

The apples are conspicuously
worm-eaten

and they are meant to bring to mind,
the apple from which Eve ate,

which condemned man to
sin, death and time.

And their counterpoint
is the vine leaves

which stand for Christ and they
stand for the wine

that is Christ's
blood that saves us from death.

The painting is about death,
the worm-eaten apple and the hope for

eternal life divine,

and yet Caravaggio always
leaves space for doubt.

Some of the vine leaves have begun to

wither and they seem almost to have
turned into hands, gesturing,

reaching for salvation as
if salvation isn't, in fact, certain.

And the whole basket of fruit
teeters on the edge of the ledge as

if about to fall.

It's a picture that's got
so much in embryo of what makes him

an extraordinary artist.

It's one of the great
paintings in the world.

Caravaggio's still life resurrected
one of the most popular and

fascinating of art's disciplines.

The impact of the work can
only really be

understood in the context of what
had come before.

With his humble subject, dedication
to realism and sublime technique,

Caravaggio had revived a genre
of painting lost since antiquity.

In ancient Egypt, large-scale tomb
paintings have been discovered

that contain elements familiar
to still life.

Again, Ancient Greek art also
depicted simple objects that

point towards the genre.

But the finest examples of the
ancient world's still life

wouldn't be revealed until a
discovery in the mid-18th century.

From under the ash of Pompeii,
early excavations of the site

uncovered 2,000-year-old Roman
still life frescoes.

uncovered 2,000-year-old Roman
still life frescoes.

There are interesting examples
in Roman arts of paintings of fruit

and fish and water and jugs of wine,

and these are described
as works of Xenia art.

Now, Xenia is a fantastic, ancient
Greek word and means a kind of

guest-host friendship
or the gifts that are given

between guests and hosts.

The Xenia paintings aren't just
pretty things,

they are not just there
to show off the skill of the artist,

they are not just there
to show off the skill of the artist,

they had a job of work to do.

The Roman Empire is a massive place,

people are travelling the whole time,
there's a huge trade in goods,

in ideas, there's a lot of political
visits from diplomats,

and I think, in some ways, the Xenia
paintings are saying to the

wider world, "we are
a cosmopolitan society,

"we accept people who
travel from foreign lands,

"and this is the kind of hospitality
that you can expect from us."

These Xenia paintings
are the clearest examples of ancient

still life that form a direct link

with the later tradition
of European work.

Whoever painted this fresco was
thinking in exactly the same way

as artists who would come later.

The subjects chosen are domestic.
These are humble things.

There's a range of textures
on display.

We can see a dialogue between the
natural and the man-made.

Objects overhang the edge
of the table, breaking the line,

emphasising perspective.

Even in the earliest work in
the genre,

we can see defined
rules of composition.

And there's another
link between ancient Xenia

and still life we know today...

The direction of light.

So the first thing that I'm going to
do is just move my hand very,

very loosely and expressively over
the surface of the paper,

which is just making a first
response to the shape and the texture

and the size
and the weight of the subject.

Fairly soon,

I am going to be thinking about the
lighting of it because I want this

to look three-dimensional and I am
instinctively lighting from the left.

If you go to a national gallery
and have a look at a broad spectrum

of still life, have a look at which
direction the light is coming from.

And in the majority
of paintings it is going to be

coming from the left-hand side.

coming from the left-hand side.

So here we have a classic example -
Caravaggio's Basket Of Fruit.

And the light is very clearly
coming from the left, we can see the

shadow just underneath the grapes,
and also on this side of the basket.

From the left. From the left.

From the left.

From the left. From the left.

Perhaps it is to do with literacy.

The fact that in the West
we are learning to read

and write, from infancy, we are
dealing with text and the input

of written information from left to
right, left to right, left to right.

It's almost as if the Western
brain has been programmed to

take in information

and therefore to prefer the receipt
of information from left to right.

It's in the Xenia frescoes
discovered at Pompeii

we find all the emerging
rules of still life.

The genre was pioneered within
Roman visual culture,

but no matter how skilled the work
or popular its appeal, still life

was destined to be considered
the lowest form of art.

A fact one of Rome's greatest
authors

and philosophers would be
quick to point out.

Pliny the Elder was a Roman
period author.

He worked and lived in the first
century AD. Very prolific,

and his great work is
the Natural History.

It's an extraordinary undertaking.

In a way, it is
the world's first encyclopaedia.

And why this is so significant for us

is that there is a whole paragraph

devoted to a discussion of still
life,

and whether still life is
a higher or lower form of painting.

In a way, Pliny is the world's first
art critic

because he's introducing a particular
painter, called Peiraikos,

who is supposed to be a splendid
artist, to have extraordinary talent,

and yet, as Pliny says, "the question
is whether he debased himself

"because he chose to paint simple
and base things,"

and he's actually got a fantastic
Latin word to describe him.

He calls him a rhyparographos,

which means a painter of low
and meanly things.

He was successful, as Pliny says
here, he obtained great glory,

his work sold for a lot of money,
and yet this is really

marginalising still life painting,
this is saying, this is not

a higher form of the art, this is
something which really is base.

Pliny's words would set the tone on
how still life would now be rated.

It would be seen as vulgar,

less worthy than other supposedly
superior genres.

To be practised by those
artists of lower status.

But it wasn't just marginalisation
that would be the issue.

When the Roman Empire fell, the art
of still life would fall with it.

It would vanish.

THUNDER RUMBLES

Europe would now enter
the medieval age

and there would be no
place for painting ordinary objects.

The period commonly referred to as
medieval,

it's over 1,000 years long.

It starts around the fall of Rome,

so about 400AD, and it continues
right up until the Renaissance,

you could say up until 1500 AD.

But the defining characteristic of
this period is

the rise of Christianity,

the all-pervasive impact
of Christianity,

particularly on visual culture.

Christian painting had no place,
really, for ordinary,

secular objects because it was
always the higher world,

the heavenly world,
the very radiant world.

If you get an artist who's simply
painting bowls of oranges or

bunches of flowers, that is
not really helping anyone, it is

not contributing to
Christian society.

Still life doesn't actually
exist in the medieval

period as a specific artistic genre.

You don't get objects in isolation,

they tend to function as symbols
or attributes.

So, for example, the apple -
if you saw a painting,

an image of an apple, the medieval
mind would immediately start

connecting that with other
narratives, other connections.

For example, Adam and Eve.

So, the apple would be a symbol of
the fall from grace that Adam and Eve

undertake after having eaten
the apple from the Tree of Knowledge.

And if it was depicted
in visual culture,

you wouldn't see just an apple by
itself, you would have the apple and

then you would have Adam and Eve,
the tree and the serpent as well.

The Catholic Church was the absolute
force behind medieval art.

In biblical terms,

anything that glorified a mere
object was strictly forbidden.

There were to be no graven images.

But one particular
painting does take us

a step closer to the
rehabilitation of still life.

This is Duccio's The Annunciation,
painted over 700 years ago.

It contains Renaissance
still life in embryo.

When the simplest things began to
acquire a symbolic power...

all of their own.

"The Angel Gabriel was sent
to a virgin

"and the virgin's name was Mary.

"Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found
favour with God and behold,

"thou shalt conceive in thy womb,
and bring forth a son.

"And you will call his name, Jesus.

"And of his kingdom,
there shall be no end."

I suppose one way of thinking
about Christian art is that it was

a visual Bible for a largely
illiterate population.

When the high art of the Middle Ages
developed, it was not only

something that was
beautiful for its own sake

but it would have an instrumental,
educational value

so you would see the angel,
and Mary devoutly, eyes down,

and listening to this solemn address,
and consenting to do the will of God.

But there would be little
interpretative tools in there,

and probably the classic one is
the vase of lilies,

lilies being a sign of sexual
innocence.

This is very loaded,
very potent symbolism.

The object is still
relegated in terms of its scale and

prominence within religious
painting, but the item is growing

in symbolic power and it was this,

alongside a technical development
in paint,

that would provide a launch-pad for
the re-emergence of still life.

Up until now,
all major art works used tempera.

This was a paint which used opaque
egg yolk to bind pigment,

and it restricted what great
artists could achieve.

It required small brushstrokes,
dried quickly,

and had a dull matte finish.

It would take a new innovation to
allow still life to grow

towards illusion.

That's where oil comes in.

As a relatively new binding medium,
it does create a revolution,

if you like,
in terms of what artists can show.

Housed at St Bavo Cathedral in
Belgium is the first major

painting of the Renaissance to take
full advantage of the new medium,

the Ghent Altarpiece from 1432.

Oil allowed artists to achieve
greater virtuosity.

Compared to a generation before,

they could now paint with a new
level of intense detail.

A mix of natural and man-made
materials that would soon

become the mainstays of still
life are all on display.

But now, it's almost as if you
could hold the object in your hand.

With oil you can create much more
depth and light and shadows

and contrasts between
light and dark,

all things that are crucial to render
all these materials properly.

I think the developments
of oil painting is hugely

important for still life.

The early painters of oil,
they took those small-scale

skills of being able to depict
flowers and fruit.

Oil paint enabled them
to take that on to the large scale

and they could create these
wonderful effects.

Oil paint just gives this
whole new life and...

light and sense of moisture
and freshness to art.

By the 16th century,

the church continued to be the main
commissioner of European art.

But now painters were depicting
elements of still life with

a new sense of obsessive detail.

Artists' love affair with the
ordinary stuff of life would grow

and grow until still life would
begin masquerading

as religious work.

And there are no better examples
of this bold artistic duplicity

than at the National Gallery
in London.

In the Four Elements by Flemish
painter Joachim Beuckelaer,

the artist has to satisfy
the demands of the church,

so we find Jesus appearing to his
disciples after the Resurrection.

The true prominence in the painting
is given to a market scene,

teeming with details of fish.

The Son of God has been firmly
pushed into the background.

Now we see Christ seated with Mary

and Martha after raising
Lazarus from the dead.

But Beuckelaer has positioned Jesus
away in the back room.

He's little bigger than
the loaf of bread,

placed in the foreground, littered
with elements of still life.

In a painting of the same Bible
story by Spanish artist Velazquez,

we see the same ploy of inserting
still life within religious works.

Again, the figure of Jesus.

But the fish, which are
the symbol of Christianity,

are given more prominence
than Christ himself.

After 1,000 years
of being hidden from view,

still life has begun to climb out
from behind the veil of religion.

Christianity has got a very
odd relationship to still life

because from the one point of view,
and indeed for centuries,

it wouldn't tolerate it.

There'd be no place in a world
that wanted radiant golden heaven

around the saints
and figures of the Bible.

There was going to be
no place for the everyday.

But when still life does revive,
it's revived through Christianity.

It rides on the coat-tails
of Christianity.

By 1596, when Caravaggio finally
painted The Basket Of Fruit,

he achieved something that
no-one had seen in living memory.

He eliminated every obvious feature
of grand religious narrative

and placed the sole focus
on a humble, simple object.

He'd created a world without God.

Although he brought
the genre out from the shadows,

Caravaggio would never paint
another still life in his career.

Although his fruit basket
is such a famous picture,

that's Caravaggio on the way up.

That's what he wants to
leave behind, that kind of work.

He wants to paint
human bodies in action.

By the early 1600s,

Caravaggio was being commissioned

to paint important
religious pictures,

such as this painting of Christ
and the disciples at Emmaus.

In other words,

he had become a major provider of
pictures to the Catholic authorities,

applying the realism
of his early years

to the business of depicting
scenes from the Bible.

Caravaggio may have begun to focus
on explicitly religious subjects...

..but he still finds space
for an old friend.

The Basket Of Fruit has been
here at the Ambrosiana

since the gallery opened in 1607.

It was added to the
collection by the founder,

Cardinal Federico Borromeo.

Borromeo was a major collector
of art during the Renaissance

and a key figure in the development
of still life painting.

His love of
The Basket Of Fruit

made him desire more works
in a similar vein.

He began to commission
other early still life works

from further afield.

If you go to Milan and you
look at the Ambrosiana collection,

on the one hand you've got
Caravaggio,

on the other hand you've got Raphael.

But then you've got huge amounts
of Dutch still life painting.

This spectacular flower piece
at the Ambrosiana

is by the Flemish painter
Jan Brueghel.

As part of their studies,

Northern European artists
like Brueghel

would make the pilgrimage south,

to soak up the influence
of the masters of Italian art.

This was very important
for artists to go there.

It was part of their training,
their education.

And you do see influences
on their work when they come back.

It has a huge impact
on their style and development.

I think it's hardly surprising

that Northerners were drawn
in particular to Caravaggio

and took these lessons back with them
to the north

and became integral,

became rooted, embedded in the art
of the north in the 1600s.

It was in Northern Europe

that still life would fulfil
its potential

and, in particular,

tiny Holland that would provide
the setting for a golden age.

I think it's incomparable
what happened in Amsterdam,

especially in Amsterdam around 1600,

to see how this art market
almost exploded,

all of a sudden.

It's amazing how fast still life
spreads in Europe.

It really is a mass phenomenon.

By the 17th century,

Dutch painters returning from Italy

were coming home to a nation
that had been revolutionised

by a political and religious storm -

the Protestant Reformation.

An iconoclastic rage
swept the country,

transforming visual culture.

The extravagant Catholic art

that had dominated for over
1,000 years

was torn down, destroyed.

The Dutch had declared themselves
a republic,

free from the influence of monarchy,

free from the Catholic Church.

A new Protestant merchant class
wanted a different type of art.

Art that reflected a new world
they'd created for themselves.

This is really secular painting.

It's almost the first era

of absolutely non-religious
painting in the world.

And of course, the thing that's
making that power of secularism

is the economy,
what's happening with the economy.

The Dutch refer to the 17th century
as their Golden Age.

And with good reason.

This small republic on
the northern edge of Europe,

uncoupled from the church
and monarchy,

used its freedom to transform itself

into an economic
and cultural superpower.

They were quite simply

the richest nation on earth.

This is the 17th-century
canal house of the Van Loon family,

the most influential
of Amsterdam's merchants,

who weren't slow
in enjoying their new affluence.

Their fabulous wealth,

like that of the nation,

was built on vast maritime
trading networks

that spread across the globe.

The Dutch ships were
trading all over the world.

And they were bringing in
masses of stuff,

all sorts of materials and objects,

into the Netherlands
and to the rest of Europe

which you also find in the still life
paintings from the period.

So, you find Chinese porcelain...

..exotic flowers,

exotic fruit,

all that sort of thing.

In still life painting,

the Dutch work out
their relationship to things.

the Dutch work out
their relationship to things.

They're, in a way,
the first consumer society.

So they are awash in plenty
and in luxury goods.

The Dutch art market boomed

like no other market
in Europe had boomed.

But it went with the idea
that when you get wealth,

you should decorate your house,
your home. It's the only other...

it's the only foyer for the display
of wealth in the Netherlands

cos there isn't a court

and there isn't a church
that's going to gobble up

the national surplus wealth.
So it's in the home.

So the primary object of
Dutch wealth is the paintings.

Dutch culture was unique in that

everybody was buying paintings.

You know, the postman
was buying paintings.

The baker was buying paintings.

A baker owned several Vermeers.

This was art for everybody.

In these early decades
of the 17th century,

millions of paintings
must have been made.

millions of paintings
must have been made.

So it was a fully new market.

A mass market for paintings
on this scale

had never been seen
anywhere in the world before.

Art became an industry.

And such was the craze
for still life

that customer-savvy painters

began to develop mass production
techniques

to satisfy the demand.

OK, this is a still life
with dead game, from Franz Snyders.

Franz Snyders went to
Italy for a short period

and after he came back,

he developed much more his own style.

So it was clearly

a very important visit for him.

So it's a very interesting piece,

in terms of studio practice.

Because when you look at
this particular painting,

you can see there's big motifs
of the roe deer, the boar,

the lobster on the plate,

the dead birds here and there,

fruit, vegetables -

everything is in there.

And if you look at
other works by Snyders,

you find that these motifs
have been used again and again.

We know by making
a tracing of the deer

on transparent foil,
melinex foil,

and then placed it on
other paintings by Franz Snyders

showing the same motif.

And with small variations,
very small variations,

it fit it quite well.

So the idea that a painter
would sit

with this whole banquet here
in front of him

is not really realistic.

In this case, Snyders would have
drawings

of all these different motifs

and he would combine them
into an interesting composition

and repeat that with different
combinations for other paintings.

There was an incredibly
demanding market

so they needed to produce
quite large numbers of works

and this is an efficient way
of creating new compositions.

Creating fictional compositions
became commonplace.

Perhaps the perfect example

of Dutch artists foregoing reality
in pursuit of striking composition

can be seen in their approach
to nature,

with floral still life.

Looking at the flower paintings
of the 17th century,

it's about bringing together

as many beautiful, rare and exotic
examples of flowers

as you possibly could.

It's done purely
for pictorial effect.

It's very much this
anti-natural impulse.

And so what you are looking at
is what humans do with nature,

not nature itself.

You find flower painting

where species that could not possibly
exist in the same seasonal moment

are brought together in a kind of
triumph of wealth and ownership.

I think what they are

is a kind of coded celebration

of the Dutch Republic's
power and influence.

Because what you get is

you get these flowers from different
parts of the world

in which the Dutch
have been trading.

And yet,
they're all in the same vase.

So what the vase of flowers
expresses

is the extent, the global extent,
of Dutch maritime trade.

That painting is a kind of...

"This is us."

It's a bouquet of power.

During the Golden Age,

fortunes could even be made
in the flowers themselves.

And in particular,
this new import from Asia.

Tulip mania, as it was called,
saw the trade in tulip bulbs

become engulfed in crazed
financial speculation,

sending prices soaring.

The bulb of a single tulip

could cost three times
as much as a house.

So they were such rare
and exotic plants

that no-one would cut them.

You wouldn't have tulips
as cut flowers

in real life

because they were just too expensive
and, you know,

you just would never do it.

In paintings, to see a whole bouquet
of just tulips

was outrageous.

Displays of outrageous affluence
took several forms

and were commonplace
in Golden Age still life.

The Dutch were hungry for the
prestige that went with consumption.

Another genre that's developed
are banquet pieces

where you get tables
not unlike this amazing table here

that are absolutely
uninhibited displays

of maximum possession of wealth.

Lobster and crayfish are not normal
foodstuffs in the Netherlands

and citrus fruit doesn't grow
in the Netherlands.

It all has to be brought in

so it's a celebration
of that kind of power

to bring together in one place
all the luxury of the world.

As the genre matures,

you find that the scene of
consumption, the scene of wealth,

it becomes increasingly barbarous.

Things are pushed over.

The whole table is sort of strewn
with a kind of principle of litter.

It's wreckage.
It's like destruction,

consumption as destruction.

At the same time,
it's a Calvinist culture

with a tremendous amount of guilt
about acquisition.

They're generally worried

that although they've worked
hard for this, earned it,

nonetheless in wealth itself
there's a principle of corruption

that will undo them or undo
their souls or make them unhappy.

So, you find a very odd,

kind of, push-pull thing happening
in Dutch still life painting

between on the one hand
a perfectly understandable desire

to celebrate all this wealth
with which the country is awash.

At the same time,

a sort of residual religious
sentiment that this is not good.

Strictly speaking,
as devout Calvinists,

the Dutch shouldn't be celebrating
their affluence with decorative art.

So how do you keep
collecting paintings

and avoid the corrupting influence
of acquisition?

Still life painters had an answer
for these guilty Protestants,

containing a message with a rather
daunting reminder of mortality.

The subject of the vanitas, the
painting that reminds us of death,

is a whole class of still life
painting

where the symbols of death
and mortality

and the transience of human life

are so obvious
that they can't be avoided.

Most often, we recognise
a vanitas painting

by the presence of a skull,

which is sort of a dead giveaway
that, you know,

everything else around the skull
has to do with the idea

of death and transience

and the futility of
accumulating material possessions

because, when you die,
you don't take it with you.

Very often, another component
that we see

are helmets or militaria

that remind you of
the futility of war, ultimately.

A lot of times, you see items
that have to do with music

because before recorded music,

music was something that existed
only as you played it.

And as soon as you stopped,
it was dead.

It didn't exist any more.

It's as if these people
are celebrating their riches

and yet there's always this vanitas
undertone of meaning.

You know, all of this is going
to fade, it will pass.

And Holland, you know,
Holland was a hugely volatile nation.

Fortunes were made and lost
like that.

So any depiction of riches,
wealth, grandeur and splendour

was always, you know,
was always threatened.

A still life painting makes that
perfectly explicit.

You know, you can always imagine
pulling that cloth

and everything would go
onto the floor.

Well, life was like that
for the Dutch.

Despite the millions of paintings

that were created in Holland
during the 17th century,

the most comprehensive
collection of Golden Age still life

is to be found somewhere
a bit closer to home.

The Ashmolean has surprisingly
one of the largest,

if not the largest,

collections of still life painting

from 17th-century
Holland and Flanders

in existence.

It's a remarkable collection

because it covers every aspect
of still life painting

in the period from the early 1600s
through to the early 1700s.

Well, here we are in the collection
of still life paintings, at last.

This collection was given to us
in 1939

by a collector from Newcastle,
called Theodore Ward,

who made his money
in international paint.

The collection was given to us
in memory of his widow,

Daisy Linda Travers,

or Daisy Linda Ward
as she became after her marriage,

who was an opera singer
in her early years.

The collection is probably the most
comprehensive of its kind

The collection is probably the most
comprehensive of its kind

in existence.

Most of the great names
of the 17th century

are here in this gallery.

And it goes round the room
in a sequence

passing through the large paintings
of Isaak Soreau,

an artist who came from Frankfurt,

and who painted in a tradition
that's slightly different

from the tradition that we associate

with painting in Holland
at this time.

The painting by Clara Peeters

is probably one of
the most important paintings

in the collection of the Ashmolean,

not because Clara Peeters
is a famous artist.

In fact the opposite is true.

Her life is particularly obscure.

We don't know where she was born,
we don't know when she was born.

We're not even sure
who taught her to paint.

But the pictures themselves
bear witness

to the accomplishment in the art
of still life painting

by an artist who was working
in the 1620s, 1630s.

Her work is magnificent.

And as we come round to
this long wall,

we pass a great display
of the more florid painters

of the middle years
of the 17th century.

And it moves through
a really sensational

group of paintings
by Abraham Van Beyeren,

whose banquet pieces
speak for themselves,

so gloriously detailed are they.

A grand banquet of a type
which no doubt

Abraham Van Beyeren himself
rarely enjoyed.

And we move round the corner
into a series of paintings

which take us towards
the end of the 17th century

and into the beginning
of the 18th century,

when this much more
decorative tendency,

the more florid and colourful
tendency

that we saw in these
earlier paintings

reaches a kind of rococo apogee.

And this is a tendency
that continues through

into the works of Rachel Ruysch,
for example,

whose ornamental
and almost rococo pictures

represent a final theme

in the development
of Dutch still life painting

as it emerged
in the early 1700s.

She was a very important artist

but she was also one of the last
in this great century of paintings

that mark the golden age in the
history of the art of still life.

I suppose my favourite painting
in this gallery

is the least typical of them all

and one that stands aside
from the more sumptuous paintings

that were being done in the lifetime
of the artist, Adriaen Coorte,

about whom we know very little.

You get what you see in
a painting like this.

It is very...

understated.

And the reason why he painted it
is particularly opaque,

other than the fact that
he wanted to make an image,

and a particularly liquid
and beautifully-lit image,

of such a commonplace thing
as a bundle of asparagus.

It's making out of the stuff
of nature and the commonplace

something that is as lasting as
a work of art and a thing of beauty.

I've never felt so warmly
about asparagus in real life

as I do in the flat and silent
art of still life painting.

I love this one.

Taking commonplace things

and elevating them
into objects of great beauty

wasn't just restricted
to the Netherlands.

Spanish painters had also begun
to explore the art of materialism.

In Spain, which is an immensely
powerful country

with a huge empire, a vast economy
and a very powerful aristocracy...

Nonetheless, its interpretation
of still life painting

is to locate its true
being in the monasteries,

in monastic painting,

painted by painters
who either were lay brothers

painted by painters
who either were lay brothers

or had experience
of monastic communities.

These austere arrangements

were painted by a
Spanish Carthusian monk,

Juan Sanchez Cotan.

They're known as works of Bodegons,

larder pieces.

The items of food featured were
stored within a concrete block

The items of food featured were
stored within a concrete block

and suspended on string

to help with refrigeration.

Unlike his contemporaries
in the Netherlands,

Cotan was a dedicated realist,

painting the world
exactly as he found it.

If you look at Cotan,

it's very much about a kind of
renunciation of the world.

It's about leaving the world.

Not believing in the world's show.

Looking at the simplest things
in the world because your values

are adjusted to the values of
monastic life, contemplative life.

In some Spanish still life painting,
you get the contents of a larder.

It could not be more unimportant.

They are arranged in these
suspensions of string

that make them seem like
mathematical constructions

or like the solar system.

They look completely out of this
world. They look otherworldly.

Otherworldly still life.
No other school does that.

If the 17th century had seen
the golden age of still life,

in the 18th, it suffered
a more complicated fate.

This is the world-famous
Louvre, in Paris.

In its earlier existence,
it was the French royal palace.

By the 18th century,
Louis XIV, the Sun King,

decided this place wasn't grand
enough

to suit his rather extravagant
tastes and moved his entire court

to a new home, Versailles.

Back at the Louvre, the building was
soon occupied by a new institution

that would make Paris
the centre of European art.

The French Academy was
founded in 1648

and the elected academicians agreed
what were the rules of art.

They decided what constituted
the best kind of art,

They decided what constituted
the best kind of art,

what was less important art,
what was the least important art,

and they also controlled, in effect,
royal commissions,

so anyone who wanted
to get big money for painting

needed to go through the Academy.

The academies placed a very high
value on drawing

and painting the human figure. Life
class was the centre of the Academy.

and painting the human figure. Life
class was the centre of the Academy.

Artists were chiefly judged
for their talent as figure painters.

They were trained to paint
human figures,

they were trained to paint
physiognomy and gesture and action.

Human drama, in other words,

which was regarded as the most
important element,

so that an artist who did not paint
the human figure

or indeed in some cases artists who
could not paint the human figure,

were regarded as the bottom
of the heap.

The academic tradition of painting
placed still life,

which just shows inanimate things,
absolutely bottom,

then came landscape which was
depiction of the world,

then came portrait, depiction of man,
but then the serious stuff begins.

Mythological painting, narrative
painting, biblical painting.

That was high art because it shows
man in action, man in thought.

That's why this hierarchy exists.

Still life painters are always
fighting an uphill battle,

always fighting to be taken
seriously.

Chardin, the great French
still life,

probably the first still life
painter to begin to be really

taken seriously, he fights
the good fight.

"Proust once wrote an essay
in which he set out to restore

"a smile to the face of a gloomy,
envious and dissatisfied young man.

"He pictured this young man sitting
at a table after lunch one day

"in his parents' flat, gazing
dejectedly at his surroundings.

"The mundanity of the scene would
contrast with the young man's taste

"for beautiful and costly things
which he lacked the money to buy.

"Proust imagined the revulsion
the young aesthete would feel

"at this bourgeois interior,
and how he would compare it

"at this bourgeois interior,
and how he would compare it

"to the splendours he had seen
in museums and cathedrals.

"To escape his domestic gloom, the
young man might leave the flat

"and go to the Louvre, where at
least he could feast his eyes

"on splendid things.

"Touched by his predicament,
Proust proposed to make

"a radical change to the young man's
life by way of a modest alteration

"to his museum itinerary.

"Rather than let him hurry to
galleries hung with paintings

"by Claude and Veronese,

"Proust suggested leading him to a
quite different part of the museum,

"to those galleries hung with
the works of Jean`Baptiste Chardin.

"A peach by him was as pink
and chubby as a cherub,

"a plate of oysters
or a slice of lemon

"were tempting symbols of gluttony
and sensuality.

"A skate slit open
and hanging from a hook

"evoked the sea of which it had
been a fearsome denizen
in its lifetime.

"Its insides,
coloured with a deep red blood,

"blue nerves and white muscles,
were like the naves of a
polychrome cathedral.

"After an encounter with Chardin,

"Proust had high hopes for the
spiritual transformation

"of his sad young man as he wrote,

"'Once he had been dazzled by this
opulent description

"'of what he called mediocrity,
this appetising depiction of a life

"'he had found insipid,
this great art of nature

"'he had found so paltry, I should
say to him, now, are you happy?'"

I think what's remarkable about
Chardin is he is undeniably
a great artist.

He's got total command of his medium

and none of his critics

and observers of his time

could possibly deny that this was

a master of handling
the medium of paint.

But what was fascinating and what
was such a challenge

to his contemporaries was what he
decided it was important to paint.

to his contemporaries was what he
decided it was important to paint.

He didn't just say that still
life was important.

He showed in a visceral
and sensory way that it could be.

Jean-Baptiste Chardin was
an 18th-century French artist

and one of the finest painters of
still life the world has ever known.

Born in Paris,
he never once left the city.

He lived in a period dominated
by the extravagant rococo style
of Neoclassicism.

His simple act of revolution was to
create a world of truth and calm.

In 1728,
without establishment contacts

and with no intellectual background,

Chardin submitted two works to the
all-powerful French Academy.

He was instantly accepted.

He's like a revolutionary force
that's constantly being pushed down.

In the Academy,
he was given the lowest possible job,

the person who hangs
the paintings for the annual shows,

so he's officially where he should
be, at the bottom of the heap.

One has to remember that
for the 18th century,

in France and in all Europe,

the major quality of a painter
was invention.

To paint a still life was considered
as the simplest thing you could do

To paint a still life was considered
as the simplest thing you could do

because you had no invention.

You had in front of you some peaches
or something,

and you had to copy them. It looked
like it was so simple to do so.

Chardin in a certain way
breaks this.

He is trying to say, he is proving
that in a certain way

it is as difficult and as great
to paint something you see,

as something you don't see,

and for the 18th century it was
very difficult to accept this.

He had his own way of thinking,
his own way of painting

and in fact for him, simplicity
was one of the keys
of the greatest art.

Simplicity, but what I think is
even more important for him

is how to paint silence.

To paint fruit is very easy but to
paint silence is very difficult.

Chardin is really a sort
of peaceful place,

a sort of peaceful garden
out of time

where you forget the trouble
of your everyday life.

We are living around objects,
objects around us everywhere.

We are not looking at them.

We are forgetting that they
are unique in a certain way.

That food is unique,

le gobelet d'argent,
silver has always beauties.

An artist, especially an artist
interested in still life,

to make you aware of the beauty of
things around you.

With such magnificent ability,
Chardin's reputation and fame grew

and despite his radical
choice of lowly subject,

he became one of the richest
painters in France.

In one slightly bizarre work,

we can see him parody his own
position

whilst poking fun at his detractors
within the Academy.

Chardin knows a lot about optics

and will have had conversations
about how the eye works,

and he introduces something very
amazing into still life painting,

which is the idea that the eye
doesn't see

everything at the same degree
of vigilant high focus.

If you look at most Chardin
paintings,

there will be one, two or
maybe three perches

for the eye to rest on, where
things are in high focus,

and the rest will be blurry
and that blur

is something very special to Chardin.
No-one produced this before Chardin.

He had techniques he didn't want
people to see,

because there is no record of what it
was like to watch Chardin paint,

but it's very clear
he had a lot of unorthodox techniques

for applying the paint to the canvas.

It's very clear he was handling
paint, which you shouldn't do.

If you look at the late self
portraits, his skin is going grey

until finally it's completely grey
and he's dying of lead poisoning.

He has been handling paint
all his life and takes its toll.

Paint is a very toxic substance.

Within the French Royal Academy,
Chardin would influence

the perception of what
still life could achieve.

In 1770, another still life painter
would submit works

whilst applying to join
the institution.

This artist would face a different
kind of prejudice.

She was 26-year-old
Anne Vallayer-Coster.

She was one of only four women
ever accepted in the French Academy.

At the time,
very few female painters

could even dream of a serious career
in art.

She was enormously talented,
incredibly confident handling

both of composition
and the surface texture of things.

She was patronised
by Marie Antoinette.

She enabled Vallayer-Coster to
get lodgings in the Louvre,

which was absolutely exceptional
for a woman, and meant she had

her lodgings and studio in among the
other top artists of her time.

The academies were the key
institutions

if you wanted a successful
career as an artist

but they were of course deeply
problematic for women.

At a very straightforward level,

women were not allowed
in art academies

because there were naked men
there,

and women were not allowed to hire
male models to paint from.

However, women were allowed
to look at bunches of grapes.

That's one of the reasons why women
flourish in the field

of still life painting.

It's one of the few
areas they're allowed in!

Women were barred
from acquiring the skills

they need for the higher genres,
and then they were told that women

were only capable
of the lowest ones.

Although they might be seen
a equal to men within that sphere,

they could never quite get
the higher status and reputation

that was open to men.

Vallayer-Coster is typical of a line
of female artists

throughout history, whose desire to
paint found expression

through the only genre considered
suitable for them.

Women were marginalised in art

and found an outlet in the
disregarded genre of still life.

The talent Vallayer-Coster displayed
demonstrates that she was the equal

of any other Academy painter.

In the end, her association
with Marie Antoinette

and the Royal Court would have a
ruinous effect on her career,

as French society was engulfed
in the pandemonium of revolution.

By the 19th century,
France had been transformed.

Despite the political turmoil,
the strict French Academy system

had survived but art too was about
to undergo its own revolution.

An unknown painter from a small
town in the south of France

was about to change everything.

Still life would lead the charge.

The artist's name was Paul Cezanne.

Cezanne was born here in the small
town of Aix-en-Provence in 1839.

It was here he built his studio

and dedicated himself to
a revolutionary artistic style.

Today he is remembered
as a monumental figure,

Today he is remembered
as a monumental figure,

the father of modern art.

But in his own lifetime,
many did not or could not

understand him or his work.

To his contemporaries, his radical
painting style looked rushed...

..imprecise...

and distorted.

It was the antithesis of the realism

that had dominated
European art for centuries.

Cezanne thinks, "Huh,
light falling on objects...

"Maybe painting is
all about perception.

"How am I going to emphasise
painting is all about perception?

"I know! I'll paint something
really banal.

"I'll paint an apple," and then he
says "I'll stun Paris with an apple."

He's not really painting an apple.

What he's painting
is his own way of seeing

and if you look, he's given it
a double outline.

It's his way of saying, everything
we look at is constantly just...

If you look at Cezanne, it makes you
feel a bit sick.

Picasso said the great thing
about Cezanne is his anxiety.

Painting an apple
was his way of showing his anxiety,

his uncertainty, his sense that what
we see is not fixed.

Welcome to Cezanne's studio.

The studio was designed by Cezanne
himself.

He wanted a very large
picture window on the north

and two other large windows
on the south.

The light is very important
in the studio.

The light is very important
in the studio.

He wanted to get the same condition
he had when he was outside.

Cezanne died in 1906 and the studio
doesn't change in any way.

You have the same atmosphere
in this hall.

You always smile at the painting
and the fruit.

All the objects in the studio
were painted by Cezanne

and we can now recognise
the main objects,

like this little plaster Cupid,

who was painted by Cezanne
in 10 works.

The star is this green pot
and olive pot.

A ginger pot, a round bottle,
a wine bottle, a glass.

All these objects Cezanne painted
in his still life

are very simple objects,

and the form and the reflection
of this object

was the main interest for Cezanne
for painting them.

This is the fruit bowl we see in
so many still lives.

You can recognise on this table
the specific line here.

Of course,
the skulls we can recognise

in his vanities.

And on this bottle,
we can see his finger marks.

All around.

It's very emotional to see that this
bottle was in the hand of Cezanne.

What is amazing is knowing
that the simple objects

became model of still lives

and with the subjects he concretises
all his theory on painting.

There are no long strokes.

There are no improvised strokes
and Cezanne.

They are very much the record
of individual moments of sensation.

He wanted to give a kind of exact
transcription not of the scene,

but of his perceiving of the scene,

so it's a very introverted, sensation
and consciousness-based kind of art.

His project is to tell no lies
about painting, invent nothing,

simply record, and he pursues
this project faithfully

and without swerving for years
and years without an audience.

It's a very strange story.

He only gets an audience
right at the end of his life

when he doesn't need it.
Too little, too late.

Cezanne was the first painter
of the 20th century.

He wasn't the last painter
of the 19th century,

and young painters like Picasso,
Matisse, and a friend of him,

Gauguin, thought he was the great
painter of all the Impressionists.

Picasso called him
the father of modern art,

the father of all
the painters of the 20th century.

Cezanne had abandoned the fiction

that a painting is a window
into reality

that a painting is a window
into reality

in which we see a 3D object
in a 3D space.

The rules of perspective
and representation

could now be bent to the will
of the artist.

Still life had become an artistic
laboratory for the reworking

of the visible world.

This impressionistic approach,

this challenge
to the established orthodoxy,

became widespread
in 19th-century France.

Artists such as Renoir,

Monet

and Gauguin would establish
a new language for still life.

And if the genre could be used
as a foundation stone

for a new type of expression,
it would also become fundamental

in the development of an entirely
new art form.

Photographers started
to make photographs

of still life compositions, mainly
because they didn't move.

The early kinds of photographic
processes,

you had eight-minute exposures.

Quite quickly, photographers began
to use in effect

the language of art,
the still life language of art,

to develop their technique.

By the 1850s, you get quite amazing
still life photography,

really quite amazing.

Artists definitely used photography
and responded to it,

so photography changed
the way people saw.

Once photography itself exists,

I think it makes suddenly
startlingly clear to painters

both the power of that image
and its limitations.

It's as if artists suddenly
completely reel away in horror

from the photographic,

so if you look at a Van Gogh
painting of irises,

it's a million miles away from what
a photographer would have done,

and he's emphasising his own
expressive interreaction

with the flowers, as he does
in the Sunflowers.

He shows them reaching up,
he shows them falling down.

He shows the rapidity of their
ascent and their descent.

They become images of himself but
he's also fascinated by the texture,

which of course you can't
capture in a photograph.

He stipples the paint to create that
sense of the seedhead

and you would stroke the painting
if you could, it's not advisable,

but if you could you would see that
it would feel rough to the touch

like an actual dried sunflower
seedhead.

He's given this almost sculptural
element, I would say,
in reaction to photography.

I think photography makes artists
scratch their head and think,

well, what can painting do that
photography can't do?

And from there, suddenly,

still life becomes the fundamental
form of cubism, which is

the single most
significant art movement

of the whole 20th century
and it's all still life.

Cubism allowed the exploration of an
object from every possible angle,

with artists painting the subject

from several different
viewpoints at once.

Artists such as Picasso and Braque

would use still life to
provide an anchor point

for the fragmented planes

and spatial chaos that became the
signature style of the new movement.

When Picasso is tackling
still life, it becomes illegible.

He plays around
massively within that.

It's still acceptable to audiences

because we can still read this as,
"Oh, it's a still life painting."

And, as it were, digest what's
happening experimentally

far more easily because it's
talking a classical language to us.

Why is it all still life?

Because perception itself, how the
artist sees has become the subject.

So, if you paint what everybody
sees, i.e. still lives,

what's on the table,

what you're really
showing is how you see,

how you perceive this notion
that we travel around an object,

that experience exists in time
that the flat image is not doing

justice to the complexity
of our perception.

Painting becomes
a form on philosophy

and at the moment the painting
becomes a form of philosophy.

Still life becomes the king
sitting on the throne of art.

If art is about the
elevation of subject,

then still life might
just be the king.

It's been there, acting as an
artistic barometer, helping us

explore and explain our relationship
with the material that surrounds us.

The very stuff of life.

And in the West during the
20th century, there was nothing

we liked more than stuff.

Big difference that
makes the 20th century

different from the previous
centuries is the status of objects

themselves because at a certain
point in the 20th century it

became clear that everything's going
to be machine-made from now on.

We come from a world in which
everything that we sit on,

everything that we wear,
everything we drive,

all of our appliances and
technology is machine made.

We live in a machine
world, a machine age.

And at a certain point it's clear
that to go on making classical

still life in the machine age
is...it doesn't make
that much sense.

Still life shatters into becoming
an ordinary feature of newspaper

and advertising. It goes
to live in advertising.

It's not recognised as
still life any more.

In the 20th century, if cubists
used still life to explore new

dimensions, it was advertising
that fed on its traditional form.

Now today, in the 21st century,

still life continues to
evolve in surprising ways.

What I like and interested
in, in this particular work,

is the moment of destruction is
the moment of creation itself.

Throughout my work, I'm exploring
the relationship between painting

and photography and film.

The painting of Juan Cotan
that I referred to in my film,

Pomegranate, was at the back
of my mind for many years.

There is something quite, I would
say, chilling about this painting.

The more I look at it, the more
it keeps on giving and giving.

So, thinking about Pomegranate and
I was thinking about the bullet

and there is a moment of eruption,
there is a moment of interruption.

I was imagining the seeds bleeding.

They are still life

but they are as far as one can
be removed from a still life

because what they actually
depict is an event that

happened in the most
extraordinary speed.

A speed that the human being
cannot comprehend or conceive.

I like to make things that have
the appearance of something

you've seen before and are
subverted in some kind of way.

So, these are the
flowers that I've taken

and made moulds of and then cast
and then I built on these little

pustules and sores which are
based on syphilis and gonorrhoea.

And for me, flowers are pretty
primitive breeding machines.

They're basically
there to procreate,

that's all they are,
they're sexual creatures.

So, I wanted to make them look
like sexual breeding machines.

If nature is a barometer
of the times we're living in,

the environment, then
these things could be taken

as an indication of the pathology
of the society that we live in.

That things are sick and poisoned
and that there's a problem there.

So over here we've got some
still life pictures that I made

and they are recreations
of meals that prisoners ate

on Death Row
before they're executed.

So, basically I decided that
what I was going to do was

photograph them in the style of 17th
century Dutch still life painting.

Which means that you're looking at
a photograph of a Chicken McNugget

through the framework
of a vanitas painting,

which means you're looking at it
different from what
you'd normally do,

you're thinking about the
futility of life and the

meaninglessness of the accumulation
of worldly goods and idle pursuits.

This one here, I
think is Gary Gilmore.

Burgers, boiled eggs, coffees
and little shots of whiskey.

A lot of them are
really quite touching

because the meals that they've
chosen are from their childhood.

This is Allen Lee Davis

and he had a last meal which
made it particularly easy for me

because it was using
elements that were present

in a lot of 17th century Dutch still
life. You've got the big lobster.

I mean, I think they fit in the
tradition of vanitas pictures.

It makes you look at something,
reflecting on vanity basically

and there's got to be more
to life than consumption.

The very term "still life" if you
said it to a person in the street

would sound slightly incongruous

because one thing that we know about
life now is that it's not still.

It's dynamic, it's moving,
it's constantly shifting.

Still life asks us to
arrest a particular moment

and to look closely,
to observe closely

and that is something we're
not used to doing any more.

Because novelty has such prestige,
change has such prestige.

We're constantly asking,
what's new, what's different?

Still life asks us to look at
the overlooked, the familiar

and to discover depths in it.

We speak of ourselves
as a materialistic society

but I think the problem is
we're not materialistic enough.

We're hasty in our materialism.

We constantly want to buy more
stuff but then we don't study it.

Who sat down with something
they recently bought

and actually looked closely at it,

tried to look how it was
put together and tried to

appreciate the effort, the beauty,
the complexity of an object?

There's so many things that we
have around us that are ingenious

and attractive but that we just
don't take the trouble to look at.

Still life urges us, before we
go on another shopping trip,

stop and take a proper look.