Willem Claesz Heda's origins are obscure. An inscription "aetate 84" on a 1678 Jan de Braij portrait of Heda (c. 1626/27-1697) gives us a useful indication. Heda spent his whole life in Haarlem, where he joined the Guild of St. Luke. Heda’s son, was mentioned as his apprentice in a document dated 7 July 1642. He died in Haarlem, in 1680.
The Still Life Examined
In his review of Charles Sterling’s Still Life Painting Ernst Gombrich (1959) committed himself to the view that the psychological emotions communicated by the inanimate world of still life could never have done so without the pre-existence of the genre. He did this in an argument against Croce’s view that aesthetic traditions are irrelevant to the intuitions of artists.
Gombrich does not give a reference, but the following is relevant. “Intuition is the undifferentiated unity of the perception of the real and the simple image of the possible.” (Croce , Aesthetics (1964 p 4.) Such intuition-expression cannot be subdivided. Under this view Heda would be related through hunger and the depiction of food.
The Still Life Speaks
Yet the interplay of genre and tradition is more subtle than this. Even graffiti is a genre, referred to as one by Jamie James in his book on Pop Art (1999). One could add any view that subordinates genre to forces outside of the control of tradition would come under the same criticism. Many Postmodern and Structuralist theories follow Croce; to exist at all emotion must precede genre. For example, Lacan’s view that structures of the unconscious manifest themselves symbolically in language. Like a groundswell, signifier and signified shift in an unstable relationship to each other.
The Still "Gaze"
In Norman Bryson’s view, taken from Lacan (1978), the ‘gaze’ commands an objectified world external to itself. It seeks so actively to perceive that it dissociates the visual from the social and linguistic and from meaning in general. For example, the Baroque still life tradition could only assert the reality of what it sought to represent by making it appear distant. The glance of informality has become petrified into a gaze. The genre can be subordinated to the social concern to mediate Dutch wealth to its consumers as a petrified informality. This sounds a convincing way forward, but genre is being characterised as a conceptual component. In which case the perceiver still associates society with what he sees. The gaze depends on the genre: not genre on the gaze.
The Still Life Tradition
The same inability to do without genre could also be found in Simon Schama’s view of the baroque still life artists mediating Dutch anxiety over their prosperity. To give Calvinist consciences a sense of being graced through the beauty of their food might be a motive for some still life painters. Dutch anxiety over prosperity: the admonition to temperance, could have been a concern of the industrious Heda, but this view depends upon existence of a tradition to be expanded.
Schama of course is a historian and he assumes the representational nature of the tradition to investigate Dutch history and trade. A historian of the USA could use Warhol in the same way, but it would not relate the two artists as it would first have to relate their times together. Art History and Art criticism have to proceed by defining what the work of art is. The soul of its definition lies in its power to represent. In considering the painting as representation, I have been influenced by the thinking of Paul Ziff. (1966)
Sources:
- Bergström, Ingvar. Dutch Still-Life Painting in the Seventeenth Century. Translated by Christina Hedström and Gerald Taylor. London, 1956: 123-124.
- Bryson, Norman. Looking at the Overlooked; Four Essays in Still Life Painting, (Reaktion Books) Chicago, University of Chicago Press 2004
- Croce, Benedetto. Aesthetic as Science and Expression of General Linguistic, 1902 10th ed. tr. Douglas Ainslie. Noonday Press 1964
- De Jongh, Eddy. The Interpretation of Still Lifes. Possibilities and Limits in Still Life in the Age of Rembrandt, Aukland, City Art Gallery 1982
- Gombrich, E.H. Meditations on a Hobby Horse. London 1963
- Grimm, Claus. Stilleben, Belser 2001
- Jameson, Jamie Pop Art London, Phaidon 1996
- Lacan, Jacques: Seminar Eleven: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. NY & London, W.W. Norton and Co.1978’
- Panofsky, Erwin. Early Netherlandish Painting New York Harper and Row 1953
- Schama, Simon, The Embarrassment of Riches, An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. New York, Knopf 1987
- Schrevelius, T. Harlemias: Of, de eerst stichting der stad Haarlem. Haarlem, 1648: 390. Van der Willigen 1870, 156-157.
- Segal, Sam. A Prosperous Past. Ed. William Jordan. Exh. cat. StedelijkMuseum Het Prinsenhof, Delft; Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth. The Hague, 1988: 121-140.
- Van Gelder, Henrik Enno. W. C. Heda, A. van Beyeren, W. Kalf. (Paletserie) Amsterdam, n.d.[1941].
- Vroom, Nicolaas Rudolph Alexander. A Modest Message. 2 vols. Schiedam, 1980: 1: 53-78, 2: 65-80, nos. 324-392.
- Wheelock, Jr., Arthur K. Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 1995: 99.
- Ziff, Paul. ‘On What A Painting Represents’ in Philosophical Turnings. London, 1966.
Duncan McGibbon - By contributing writer, Bath (UK) Institute Convenor and Wells Festival Prize-Winner, Duncan McGibbon
