Historical

Historical - Breakfast Items

Breakfast items, 1646 - Pierer Claesz
Oil on wood
60x84 cm

• Made by a dutch painter therefore coming from the period where the genre of still life paintings originated. The main goal of still life paintings is to create an optical illusion and make the viewers forget that the picture is an illusion of reality.
• His early works show an influence of older still life painters, but soon changed his style and limited his compositions to a small meal set near the corner of the table. This typically featured some bread or cheese on a small platter, a piece of meat on a pewter dish, a glass of beer or wine (perhaps a silvery pewter vessel), and a white crumpled tablecloth – suggesting a light breakfast or snack.
• Pieter Claesz’s still life’s prove to be very realistic due to the amazing detail in the lighting reflected on the items in the composition. The lighting serves for a tonal emphasis for the painting giving it more depth. Pieter reacted to the comprehensive forces of light and atmosphere which envelop us and the things with which we live.
• The foreground of their unpretentious arrangements is spacious, and there is clear recession. Instead of vivid local colours, monochromatic harmonies with sensitive contrasts of valeurs of low intensity are favoured, without however a loss of earlier regard for textual differentiation. From the point of view of composition, tonal, and spatial treatment, the still life’s created by Pieter Claesz are among the most satisfying Dutch paintings made during the century.
• His early work incorporates brilliant colours but as he matured as an artist, his palette was much more subtle. His compositions acquired more elegance, broadness and nonchalance than previously. Nevertheless, the objects in his still life’s rarely overlap. For Pieter Claesz, the principal aim was to render the materials and catch the reflected light as accurately as possible. This was his speciality.

Modern

Modern - Still life with silver pitcher

Still life with Silver Pitcher, 1972 - Roy Lichtenstein
Oil on canvas
51x60 inches

• Made in the Pop Art era. (1972) which explains the nature of the still life painting. the pop art movement focused on challenging the standard definitions of an artwork by including imagery from popular culture such as advertising, news etc.
• The artwork is an appropriated form of the still life genre and presents a whole new meaning, suggesting that the original standards of still life paintings have been abolished boldly stating that art is not confined by rules referring on how to correctly define an artwork into a specific genre.
• Artwork reflects a lot of the visual elements of an artwork in the Pop Art era, with a lot of vibrant colours contrasting strong black and whites. It also features strong black lines which supposably substitutes for the three dimensional aspect given by shadows and highlights – another technique used in Pop Art paintings.
• Lichtenstein's Still Lifes cover a variety of motifs and themes, including the most traditional such as fruit, flowers, and vases. During the 1970s he began to quote art-historical styles as well as his own previous works. Using his "cartoonish" method of painting, he stripped both subjects and movements of their original import and gravitas. He also mined the modern masters of painting for still life motifs, which included paintings or used alone in sculptures.
• From 1974 through to the 1980s he probed another long-standing issue: the concept of artistic style. All his series of works played with the characteristics of the well-known 20^th century art movements (such as still life). Lichtenstein continued to question the role of style in consumer culture in his 1990s series Interiors, which Included images of his own works as decorative elements. In his attempt to fully grasp and expose how the forms, materials, and methods of production have shaped the images of Western society, the artist also explored other mediums such as polychromatic ceramic, aluminium, brass, and serigraphs.