Between beauty and transience, between splendour and traces of profane everyday life - still lifes have found their way into art history as an independent pictorial genre since the Baroque period at the latest and are now one of the classic academic pictorial tasks alongside portrait, landscape, genre and history painting. As an arrangement of inanimate or still objects such as flowers, goblets, fruit or books, the genre echoes the question of what was considered worthy of a picture at the time. In the 20th century, the subject was broken up and further developed by artistic innovations such as the objet trouvé. Still lifes are now no longer merely illusionistic depictions on canvas, but are brought into the room with objects as reliefs or installations. Based on the museum's own holdings, the exhibition spans the period from 1900 to the present day and repeatedly emphasises the reference to the reality of our lives and our surroundings. After all, the still life functions as a mirror of bourgeois reality like no other pictorial genre.
Die Schönheit der Stille. Stillleben von 1900 bis heute
Publication featuring John McAllister and Olaf Metzel
October 16, 2024