Art is often the subject of heated debate: if critics don’t harp on about the way that prices paid for works have gone through the roof, they actually attack what is depicted. In 2019, for example, a monumental painting of dead game by Frans Snijders was removed from a dining hall in a Cambridge college.
It had hung there for years, but for a number of vegan students it was too much: they found the painting of all those dead creatures so repugnant that it put them off their food. They lodged a complaint and the work was promptly taken down. Old art thus suddenly found itself at the centre of modern-day discussions, which are explored from an art-historical angle in this exhibition.
The historical tension between consumption as art and art as consumption is examined with a fresh and broad perspective. It is art’s place in a social discourse about what and how we eat, about consumption and affluence, and about how we handle the products that nature offers us and to whom they belong that this exhibition explores. The issue in Cambridge is a clear illustration that it has not lost this place, and just as Snijders lavishly displayed his carefully composed products, so nowadays social network sites like Instagram are full of artfully pictured food porn – images that embody contemporary values about consumption equally unequivocally. Showing and elucidating this question is thus socially relevant in a globalized world with all its attendant socio-cultural consequences – from culinary abundance to the unequal distribution of wealth.
Today’s culinary sensitivities are obviously not the same as those four centuries ago: vegetarianism and veganism have never been so popular, and the source of our products is the subject of fierce social debate. But paradoxically, sumptuous still lifes arose out of a very specific form of social criticism. By adding all sorts of details, artists were expressly inviting people to take a very close look. They were not necessarily asking which cut of meat people would prefer on their plate, but they did want their viewers to consider their attitude to excess.
The exhibition addresses a range of subjects on the basis of a broad, diachronic selection of masterpieces in the Boijmans collection dating from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. Does a sumptuous still life presenting an abundance of luxury food and costly tableware and cutlery, for instance, really deliver an essentially different discourse about food and prosperity than a painting of a more frugal meal? And what does the confrontation with the dressed table and the elaborate tableware tell us about how we ate and drank in the past, or how we ought to eat and drink? How did people deal with abundance, and with the question of who actually owns the products that the earth has to offer, from potatoes in the ground to birds flying in the sky?
In a nutshell, this exhibition feeds not only the social debate, but body and mind as well. It does so by presenting masterpieces and lesser-known gems from the collection around four themes that flow into each other.
1. ART AS CONSUMPTION, CONSUMPTION AS ART
The tone is set by combinations of works from different disciplines. This is sometimes rather surprisingly trans-historical, but in each case there is a relation in form or content. It is a way of stressing differences and seeking continuities. Do comparable images necessarily convey similar messages? It is also meant to demonstrate that the artworks are not always just about human consumption, but by definition are the object of consumption themselves, either because of their place in the art market, or because of their owners’ social lives (conspicuous consumption). This provides a fresh look at old art and sheds light on the underlying social realities.
A focus presentation in which a sumptuous still-life by Abraham van Beijeren, surrounded by a number of relevant material objects presented on a dressed table, is at the heart of this presentation. It demonstrates that even dining itself was an almost artistic performance.
2. RICH VS. POOR
The second cluster explores the field of tension between rich and poor, particularly the artistic discourse about it. The social reality hidden behind the artworks, for instance, is illustrated by two prints by Pieter Bruegel, depicting The Fat and The Thin Kitchen, accompanied in the exhibition by the cooking pots depicted in them in bronze and earthenware respectively, epitomizing the contrast. Whereas Bruegel’s purpose was highly satirical, other artists such as Willem Kalf made a living by producing paintings depicting both rich and poor settings. Is this paradoxical, or not so different after all?
Other artists, such as Christoph Paudiss, Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin and quite recently even Scholtens & Baijings focused on simple meals, looking for beauty in simplicity. Meagre, or simple meals thus constituted an important genre, but, paradoxically, they were often made for the same types of clients. Artists often emphatically presented simplicity as a kind of moral ideal image, in which religious principles not infrequently play a major role. The most famous example is the simple meal at the Last Supper.
3. ABUNDANCE
At the other end of the spectrum is abundance, visualized at its best by the genre of the sumptuous still life, developed by Jan Davidsz de Heem. Once again, the tension between the richness of the subject matter and the superior artistic quality is key: abundance is represented in the most artful way.
Even if the moral implication in many of those paintings is far from apparent, in a Christian context such abundance was soon linked to the mortal sin of gluttony (gula), which refers to drinks as well as food. There were all sorts of images of gluttony in circulation, in the form of an allegory (Bruegel) or as personifications associated with Bacchus. However, the Christian moral is implicitly present in captions. In spite of all the criticisms, the figure of Bacchus was also cultivated on all kinds of the most artful and precious objects, from a monumental triumphal procession (Rubens) over finely engraved glasses to masterpieces of silversmithing. The preciousness of these objects thus resonates with the abundance that constitutes their main theme, and thereby stands in strong contrast to the actual moral implications behind it.
A similar veneration of consumption can be found in all kinds of drinking games, which take the use of alcohol to a higher level and have drunkenness as the ultimate goal. Not only is drinking encouraged, but the games themselves often involved extremely sophisticated and expensive objects.
Concluding this section is a group of artworks that depict excessive consumption and drinking, in various kinds of contexts, ranging from the mocking and criticizing of social groups by Adriaen Brouwer and Willem Buytewech, to a more general moral message in a painting by Jan Steen: once it has been digested, it is gone…
4. THE FRUITS OF THE EARTH
I – Abundance, however, can also be valued positively. After all, the ‘fruits’ that the Earth gives us deserve to be celebrated, certainly in a period when the success of the harvest determined prices and meant the difference between a full or an empty belly for a large part of the population. This celebration involved mythological tales, fantastic representations of an earthly paradise, or complex allegories about agriculture.
But the reality was often very different, and the riches of the earth which, in principle, are there for everybody, were (and are) unevenly divided. Land ownership is and was very unevenly distributed, which meant that by no means everyone owned a piece of land on which those products grew or those animals lived, and therefore could not lay claim to them.
Il – Yet, at the other end of the scale, people who had social privileges began to flaunt them in paint. In the Netherlands, one such privilege was that of hunting, which was basically reserved for the nobility, punishing and fining poaching. As a result, the latter part of the seventeenth century not only saw the development of the hunting still life (by Jan Baptist Weenix, among others), but also the creation of a whole range of other artworks that had hunting as the subject and served to glorify it: glasses and crockery, wall decorations and portraits.
III – Elsewhere in the world, products that previously were self-evident ‘fruits of the Earth,’ suddenly became the cause of the greatest misfortunes for local populations through the implementation of a colonial system from the sixteenth century onwards. They became inaccessible to them, while in Europe they were often sold as luxury goods and an accompanying consumption culture developed around them, for example for sugar, tea, coffee and tobacco.
The exhibition closes with an outro consisting of contemporary artworks that reflect on today’s views of consumption, how they are related to the social and ecological issues that have been touched upon in the exhibition, and the responsibility we have towards it and the future.
Note: Works on paper can change due to lux restrictions because of previous presentations.
Want to know more?
Sandra Tatsakis Director Touring Exhibitions T + 31 (0)10 44 19 421 tatsakis@boijmans.nl
