#still-life

Stettheimer's better known for her chaotic party scenes and portraits of New York's art crowd. This is a rare quiet one — just a bowl of zinnias against a curtain.

He painted apples over and over for most of his working life, dozens of times. The line everyone quotes is that he meant to astonish Paris with one — though nobody seems certain he ever actually said it.

He painted so many of these letter-rack scenes that forgers later scrubbed off his signature and added a rival's, since that name sold better.

Apparently 'Fantômas' was a wildly popular pulp villain in French novels and early films back then — the kind of cheap thrill respectable painting wasn't supposed to notice. Cubists of the period put newsprint and pulp covers like this straight into their paintings anyway, which was kind of the point: you didn't need a myth or a portrait anymore, a newsstand would do.

From what I've read he painted this in the middle of the war — he was Spanish, so he wasn't called up like most of his friends in Paris, and he just kept working straight through it.

They say painters in this circle tightened up after the First World War — fewer overlapping shards, flatter shapes, something closer to order than the earlier, more splintered cubism. This one's from that stretch, and the checkerboard corner is one of the only clues there was ever a table under all this.

By this point he'd left France for the Pacific for good and was painting what was around him — the fruit and the birds are local ones. According to Wikipedia he was broke and in bad health through most of those last years, shipping canvases back to dealers in Paris and hoping.

He kept African and Pacific carvings around his studio and painted them into scenes like this one — the bowl in the title is one of them.

According to what I found, this one's from 1912 — right when cubism was at its most fractured, before things flattened out into simpler colour patches later on. Playing cards turn up constantly in paintings from this circle, apparently because a card's already a flat, printed thing pretending to sit on a table, which suited what these painters were after anyway.

Apparently he was born in Warsaw and only picked up a French name after a friend talked him into it once he'd settled in Paris and started running with Picasso and Braque — the little balloon and flag tucked in here are supposedly his own nod to the country he adopted.

Apparently Demuth spent a lot of his later years on watercolors like this one — fruit and vegetables, painted with the same precision people usually associate with his industrial scenes.

Putting fruit on its own, with no story around it, was apparently a fairly new thing to do — fruit usually turned up in the corner of a picture about something else. People also point out that the leaves are blotchy and one apple has a wormhole; nobody seems sure whether that was deliberate or just what happened to be on the table that day.

The same jugs, cloths and bowls turn up in dozens of these — a table set up indoors and gone at for weeks on end. He worked so slowly, it's said, that the fruit went off before he was done, so he took to using wax ones.

According to the museum's blurb, he specialised in painting things so real they fool your eye — burnt-down candles, battered lamps, stuff on its way to the bin. They say he stopped showing in galleries by 1890 and just painted for neighbours near his New Jersey home.

For decades he mostly made dark, unsettling charcoal prints — this bright, ordinary bouquet came from a total swing late in his career.

This one apparently sold at a record-breaking auction price back in the 1980s, which is part of why it ended up in a Tokyo collection instead of a European one.

According to Wikipedia he starved himself on purpose, trying to see colours nobody else could see, and it killed him at thirty-five. That's presented as fact, not legend, which makes a vase of flowers feel like higher stakes than it should.

They say Gris started gluing in real newspaper scraps around 1913, following what Picasso and Braque had already been doing — this one keeps a strip of actual print sitting right next to the painted glass. The oval shape wasn't the usual choice either; most still lifes from this crowd were square or rectangular.

This one, apparently, was one of three repeats he made a few months after the originals — meant as a gift for Gauguin, though it never actually reached him.

Apparently the wood-grain pattern here is painted, not real wood or glued paper — Gris copying the collage tricks other Cubists were doing with actual materials, just with a brush. The guitar and the newspaper masthead show up together a lot in this circle's still lifes.