Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy

"Yes. One of the things that I found so moving in that book is the way that he talks about our emotional investment in things, and how something like the type of peppermint that his grandmother ate can have a huge resonance for him for his whole life. And I think he’s very right, that in one sense, that is what still life painting is about: the investment that humans make in things. When I put this list of five books together, it was very important to me not just to have five works of academic art history. I love having this book by a poet who is, in a sense, a layperson when it comes to Dutch art, even though he has clearly read a lot. This book is really talking about his individual emotional experience as a passionate museum-goer. And, for me as a curator, who happens to be responsible for the particular painting that inspired him, that was very moving to read. As he and many others point out, transience is built into Dutch still life. You often have paintings of flowers that are starting to wilt, or a glass that has a chip or a crack into it. There are all these intimations of decline and decay, even as the objects are so beautifully rendered. That ties in with Simon Schama’s argument about the fundamental ambivalence of the Dutch who, even as they experienced this incredible economic prosperity and abundance, had a lot of guilt about it tied in with Calvinist religious beliefs, with the sense that they were constantly beset and imperilled on all sides by enemy forces. “There’s this sense that they had been delivered by Providence but they could lose it all at any moment” There’s this sense that they had been delivered by Providence but they could lose it all at any moment if they weren’t careful. And I think that notion of the fragility of happiness or beauty is really built into the still lifes that Doty writes about too. Calvinist, but also built into a lot of different traditions within Christianity I would say. You have what they call the ‘vanitas’ still life that exists throughout Europe. There’s always a sense that any enjoyment you have is fleeting and a little bit guilty."