The Calouste Gulbenkian Museum is currently organising an ambitious international exhibition dedicated to the theme of European still life painting, the first of its kind to be held in Portugal.
Entitled “In the Presence of Things. Four Centuries of European Still-Life Painting”, the exhibition will be presented in two parts and will consist of a series of masterpieces by renowned European artists from the beginnings of the genre up to the mid-20th century.
The first part, which will be on show from February 12th to May 2nd, 2010, brings together 71 paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries. Works from the 19th and 20th centuries will be shown from October 21st, 2011 to January 8th, 2012.
This exhibition will explore the abiding themes of still life across nearly four hundred years: the fruit piece, the game piece, kitchen and banquet still lifes, the flower painting, musical instruments, the cabinet of curiosities, and the trompe-l’oeil. The diversity of artistic treatment of these themes in different countries will be shown through related works, such as the fruit still lifes of the female artists Louise Moillon and Fede Galizia or the kitchen scenes by Jean-Siméon Chardin and Luis Meléndez.
Other artists who cultivated this genre and who are also represented in the exhibition include Juan Sanchéz Cotán, Juan van der Hamen, Pieter Claesz, Juan Zurbarán, Rembrandt van Rijn, Antonio de Pereda, Nicolas Largillierre, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Luis de Meléndez and Francisco de Goya.
The show will examine the wide-ranging cultural and social significance of paintings of objects and foodstuffs, without the presence of the human figure. Still-life subjects contained diverse meanings for different audiences. The double-edged meaning of still lifes will be exposed: reassuring images of material contentment could also contain moral messages concerning abundance and consumption. The exhibition will include examples from the rich tradition of the Vanitas still life, in both Roman Catholic and Protestant cultures.
This exhibition has only been made possible due to the commitment of the many lending institutions, private collectors and museums, such as the National Gallery of Art in Washington, The Metropolitam Museum in New York, The Louvre Museum, The Prado Museum, The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, The Mauritshuis in The Hague, The National Gallery in London and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, among so many others.
The exhibition is curated by Prof. Peter Cherry, currently professor and Head of Department of the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland and an expert in Spanish and Italian still-life paintings. In this first part of the exhibition Prof. Cherry will be assisted by Dr. John Loughman for Dutch, Flemish and German paintings, and Dr. Lesley Stevenson for French paintings. Professor Neil Cox, from the University of Essex, will provide the guidelines for the second part of the exhibition concerning the 19th-20th century.
The exhibition catalogue, which consists of two volumes, one for each of the two parts of the exhibition, will be published in both Portuguese and English. It will contain entries for all exhibited works. The different sections of the show are introduced by contextual essays, written in a scholarly, yet accessible form, by the specialists above.
