Art: Silent Mysteries

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To paint things in a way that forgot how they'd been done before--you couldn't do that with a nymph or an angel. Nymphs and angels aren't real, and for that reason you needed to know the precedents in order to do them. But you had to know things even better to forget them, to forget their names, their styles of presentation. And only by this means, this un-naming, could the penetration of Nature--things as they really are, the silent mysteries beyond nomenclature--really begin. This was Chardin's enterprise, and in a certain sense--particularly in the domain of inanimate objects rather than the expressive human face--he can be said to be the first artist to take on its full weight.

Painters had done still life before. The tradition goes back to Greco-Roman antiquity. Still life cropped up in later painting but usually as an adjunct, a prop. From there it turned into a sort of allegorical fixture--the 17th century peach with its brown spots and wormholes, for instance, warning of the rottenness and transience at the heart of worldly pleasure.

But there is little allegorical content in Chardin's still life, and when (rarely) it occurs, one senses a throwback. What he is best at painting is things seen for their own sake, deriving their meaning from their being, not the other way around. The Ray, 1725-26, is perhaps his single most imitated work in modern times. Cezanne, Matisse and Soutine all did homage to it in copies. Anyone who has seen the verso, as it were, of a dead ray, or skate, the commonest of sights in a Paris fishmarket, knows that the underside of this fish bears a grisly resemblance to the human face. But that sort of double meaning, with its built-in pathos, would probably have struck the artist as a bit cheap. Diderot, despite his great admiration of Chardin, thought the ray disgusting--but there's nothing to suggest that Chardin was repelled by those glistening pearl-pink guts or the lunar luster on the ray's skin, let alone that (like some modern writers) he saw in the hanging ray an analogy to public execution or even the Crucifixion.

All the same, it is a dramatic picture--almost a narrative, thanks to the cat making its move on the oysters--and Chardin's finest moments lay much more in the domain of stillness, where nothing "happens" at all. We know practically nothing of Chardin's character or emotional predilections, yet we can't help sensing that no artist could have been better equipped to paint still life. (Actually, he's not unlike the cat in his own seafood paintings, fastidiously stalking, with bright-eyed attention, something that cannot move but can go stale.) Everything comes to matter under his level scrutiny. A pyramid of red strawberries becomes a blazing Etna. The surface of a plum turns into a small adventure in discrimination as he gives you the white powder on the purply-black skin and the sharper white highlights reflecting from its gloss, and challenges you to follow the means by which he conveyed both.