Art
Email
Print
Living Still Life: Spanish artist's paintings capture the reality of the Enlightenment
Washington Post Photo
The Luis Melendez exhibit will run through Aug. 23 at the National Gallery of Art.
ADVERTISEMENT
Published: May 31, 2009
WASHINGTON
Before you head into "Luis Melendez: Master of the Spanish Still Life," a show now in the East Building of the National Gallery, you should visit the West Building's permanent collection. Look for 17th-century still lifes by the Dutchman Gerrit Willemsz Heda, the Italian Antonio Maria Vassallo or the Spaniard Juan van der Hamen y Leon. They'll give you images of housewares and foodstuffs that glow with life, surfaces that buzz with every kind of brushwork, all sorts of light effects that dazzle the eye -- a sense of the everyday made numinous by art.
You won't get that sense in Melendez, who painted almost the same scenes -- but in the middle of the 18th century, more than 100 years after the Spanish Golden Age and its great still lifes. If you came cold to Melendez, you might dismiss him as technically proficient but mostly spiritless, and move on. But if you take him in right after his great predecessors, you're forced to realize that, to end up with pictures so utterly different from theirs, he had to be up to something very different from them. Understood on their own terms, the dispassionate still lifes of Melendez open a fascinating window onto his time and culture.
"It's like high-definition, isn't it?" one stranger exclaimed, to no one in particular, as he surveyed this show's 31 paintings. "They're so sharp." I believe his intuition was exactly right. These pictures are high-def's primal ancestors: They come to us from the beginning of our modern, technological, scientific times, whereas their predecessors represent the tail end of a world that still has magic floating through it.
Melendez was born in 1715, had training as an academic artist -- his father was the director of painting at Spain's brand-new Academy of Arts -- but failed to find the place he desperately wanted in the high-end world of history paintings and altarpieces. Melendez had to settle for low-prestige still life, a niche that he filled, with little competition, for his last 20 years. He died in 1780, possibly destitute.
Melendez's dates matter: They make him a child of the new Enlightenment, where "divine" light has become a physical phenomenon (Newton had shown how it could be broken down) and every living thing is just the thing it is (Linnaeus had found a genus and species for each one).
And the job of the still life, at least in this artist's novel vision of it, was to impassively record how light could strike a collection of things.
Being forced to settle for a career in still life had put Melendez in the perfect place, at the right time, to realize Enlightenment ideas, via a plum "scientific" commission.
In 1771, the Prince of Asturias -- later King Charles IV -- gave him the job of producing a huge suite of still- life paintings for his New Cabinet of Natural History, which had been inspired by a craze for science then sweeping through Spain.
Melendez wasn't a scientist. And he didn't simply abandon the aesthetics of his predecessors: His still lifes are still clearly works of art, not scientific illustrations, and are composed pretty much as Golden Age still lifes had been. They show much the same assortment of produce, fish and game staged among baskets, ceramics and glassware.
The crucial difference, now, is the impartial eye that takes in the old subjects -- that makes them suit a Cabinet of Natural History.
Shown beside its real-life subjects, a Golden Age still life would clearly seem to have transfigured them -- the art of painting had, after all, only recently moved from the church to the home. There's no transfiguration in Melendez: He simply presents things to us.
Which calls to mind the great portraits of Goya, whom Melendez might have known (they once lived on the same street).
That painter, sometimes thought of as the first truly modern artist, took the divine rulers of Spain and turned them into all-too-human bosses. Melendez takes bread -- the divine substance of the Eucharist, Flesh of Our Savior -- and turns it back to baked goods.
■ "Luis Melendez: Master of the Spanish Still Life" will run through Aug. 23 at the National Gallery of Art, on the north side of the Mall at Fourth Street NW, Washington, D.C. Call 202-737-4215 or visit www.nga.gov.
Email
Print
