Still - Life : The Inscrutable Genre
The Still Centre and the Life Around

It is widely believed, at least in Indian art circles, that still-life painting is a soul-killing academic exercise, which was introduced into the nascent art schools in Madras, Calcutta and Bombay by the British colonial system in the later half of the nineteenth century. True, historically.

And since this classroom exercise was specifically prescribed for freshmen at art schools [later, colleges], it does not behove the artists of standing to indulge in painting still-life which, they think, is one of the moribund trivia in the world of art. This conclusion is wrong. Consequently, most of the freshmen who became celebrities in later life, had left still-life painting far behind in time.

That is why when I was exploring the possibility of curating an exhibition exclusively of still-lifes by contemporary artists, often was I greeted with smiles and summary rejection of the very concept. Some artists, however, responded enthusiastically.

The elders, M.F. Husain, Paritosh Sen, K.G. Subramanyan and Krishen Khanna, for instance, appreciated the concept, and agreed to participate, along with Indian modernists of the next generation, such as, Prabhakar Kolte, Haku Shah, Gopi Gajwani, Laxma Goud, Jatin Das, Sudhir Patwardhan, Paramjit Singh, K.M. Adimoolam, Jogen Chowdhury, Badri Narayan, Jyoti Bhatt, Lalu Prosad Shaw, Anupam Sud, Chameli Ramachandran, Suraj Ghai, and Jhupu Adhikari. They have agreed to develop the concept through their paintings/drawings.

Some artists had to be convinced, and many would not agree to go back to the ‘boyhood’ of their life in art.

Let us recall retrospectives of some of our venerable elders. Besides the usual landscapes, cityscapes, self-portraits and nude studies of undergraduate days, we may come across a few still-lifes as classroom ‘studies’, stacked away in a corner in embarrassed silence. Evidently, they are youthful exercises in watercolour or charcoal, grasping the inanimate objects and their interrelated volumes in space, their local colours and effect of light on them.

	Still-life by K.H. Ara

Here I must mention still-lifes by two early Indian modernists such as Souza (1924-2002) and Ara (1914-1985). They are unforgettable because they were not ‘exercises’, but serious expressions of the artists’ inner beings. The contours of the mundane objects in Souza’s paintings show anguished distortions, appearing as metaphors of the unquiet inner life of the artist. Ara’s still-lifes, on the other hand, appear like thanksgiving for the bountiful nature, pot-bellied vases spilling over with tropical flowers and fragrance. Ara’s female nudes in their unabashed frontality show a kind of deep affinity with the shape of flower vases. They seem to suggest the fertile women of the Tropics, whom he painted again and again.

For an artist, however, painting a still-life is not to re-live his youthful immaturity.

But then, did our teachers ever tell us about those still-life paintings which forcefully spelled out the terms of strident modernity in twentieth century art? Did we ever hear in our undergraduate classes that many pioneering modernists did paint numerous still-lifes to pictorially present the elusive spread of objects in a new space-time relationship as conceived by the new generation of physicists? No and No.

In rhythm with changing times, still-life as a genre has undergone deep changes since the Roman decline around the first century A.D., when it appeared at Herculaneum as wall decoration. At least that was perhaps the earliest report on the genre’s existence in the art of the West. And around the same time, still-life of secular subjects came up in mosaics as decorations on the walls of very early churches in Rome.

By the sixth century, the historians tell us, pure still-life paintings of secular objects yielded their place to symbolic presence of things with specific religious meanings. The ancient Europeans of the pre- and early post-Christian era could not imagine what mutative changes the art of painting would undergo in far distant future. Only in the late seventeenth century the term ‘still-life’ became a useful coinage, but by that time, as we have seen, the genre had long been established.


The patient reader may refresh his memory of how the still-life by a Cubist or a Futurist avant-garde represented a universe radically different from that of the Dutch and Spanish masters of sixteenth-seventeenth centuries.

Cubism and Post-Newtonian Worldview

I reverently recall, at this point, how lucidly Prof. Sigfried Giedion in his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (Harvard University 1938-39) explained the intriguing interfaces -between Cubism and the worldview of new physics. [Italicized emphases in the excerpts are mine]:

	Pablo Picasso, 'The Card Player'

“Space in modern physics is conceived of as relative to a moving point of reference, not as the absolute and static entity of the baroque system of Newton. And in modern art, for the first time since the Renaissance, a new conception of space leads to a self-conscious enlargement of our ways of perceiving space….

“Cubism breaks with Renaissance perspective. It views objects relatively: that is, from several points of view, no one of which has exclusive authority [unlike the single viewpoint of Renaissance and post-Renaissance paintings]…. Thus, to the three dimensions of the Renaissance which have held good as constituent facts throughout so many centuries, there is added a fourth one – time.” (Space, Time and Architecture, Fourth Edition, 1961.)

The Cubists viewed objects from several viewpoints simultaneously. They went round them, exploring their internal constitution. And this Cubist practice of painting became piquantly representative of modern times, showing bewildering simultaneity of contrarieties and mutually exclusive elements retrieved from the flux of life, which, we know, is the basic principle involved in the making of a collage.

Is it not a significant coincidence in time that in 1905 Albert Einstein carefully defined Simultaneity in one of his famous works? The emergence of new Physics, and the radical breaking down of familiar forms initiated by Cezanne and pushed forward by Cubists, were coeval. Under the influence of Cezanne the first phase of Cubism stretched, say, from 1906 to 1909; the second phase of analytical Cubism covered approximately the years between 1909 to 1912; the Synthetic phase marked the years between 1912 and 1914.

The first two decades of the twentieth century were, therefore, an epoch of greatness, both for Physics and plastic Arts. It is interesting to note that great names in Physics and those in plastic Arts closely shared the same span of historical time. The former explored the ultimate building blocks of Reality, which is far removed from our day-to-day experience. The latter were working out a complex art experience that takes in simultaneously the ‘unstable’ relational patterns between multiple aspects of reality.