bon appétit! on food & art (1/2)
mostly a historical intro here. building up to why I think creatives should consider paying more attention on food as a time-based medium.
Food and art. Art and food. No surprises here, but these are two of my greatest hobbies/passions/hedonistic interests. For my first newsletter (Happy Saturday, all!), I wanted to try and articulate if, why, and how I see these two things as interconnected, starting off with the guiding questions below:
Are food and art connected? (Spoiler alert, but yes)
If so, how are food and art connected?
Why do artists have such an interest in food?
What new possibilities might food offer as an artistic medium?
The last question excites me the most, but anyways I’ll try to build up to that :)
Early Mod period: depictions of food as subject/object
Starting off with what first comes to mind, artists have been interested in food + art pretty much since forever. In the early modern period, Dutch pronkstilleven, or the genre of hyperrealistic still lifes, were intended to display the status of the wealthy individuals who commissioned them, and also offered artists an opportunity to demonstrate their technical prowess in painting something that could rival, or even surpass life itself. If you look closely, Pieter Claesz (1597-1661) includes the bread’s reflection on the pitcher in Still Life with a Turkey Pie (1627) below—these details all sought to convince viewers of the painting’s visual veracity.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fffd42af4-e0a1-4325-8da8-a79728bd0b9f_6426x3596.jpeg)
Memento mori. These vanitas paintings also served as reminders of death, and the fleeting nature of life through the symbolic nature of food that would inevitably rot and decay, all the while allowing visitors to partake in visually ‘consuming’ these delectable goods!
The Dutch Golden Age (1588-1672)
These paintings are also important because knowing about what or how someone eats, (or aspires to eat) can tell you about their cultural background, habits, history. And food has always been linked to trade, capital, and global processes of labor and exchange, which today, is so often obscured. These kinds of still life paintings were prolific during the Dutch Golden age (1588-1672), when the Dutch Empire was dominating in military, science, and trading power.
These paintings are largely devoid of the labor underlying them, and by that I mean the bevy of cooks, forced labor, and indentured servants who would have prepared these hypothetical feasts. The reality is that the Dutch Republic’s prowess in the period was directly supported by the Transatlantic slave trade which also intersected with routes to obtain sugar and other exotic goods.
Symbolism: Food as standing-in for the body
These paintings also held a lot of hidden symbols and meanings! Grapes with wine might reference the Eucharist, and there’s veeeryyy suggestive about these callipygian (had to use this word) peaches and phallic lemons in the snippets I’ve collaged above… not surprising though.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2a3a5941-0015-4152-bde6-cc7993b36075_512x578.jpeg)
More on goods and labor…
I don’t know if you noticed (scroll up!) that in almost every image there’s a nautilus shell, except the last one here, which depicts a Black figure holding a wine glass as if to whisk it away. Much like fruit as standing in for the body, these worked nautilus shells are super interesting hybrid objects and symbols that one, reflect cross cultural trade routes, where they would be ‘finished’ in the Dutch Republic with precious metals. Two, these worked nautilus shells also served as important visual referents to a vague notion of the ‘exotic.’ Some have argued that these nautilus shells could be seen as interchangeable, or equivalent to, the inclusion of an ‘exotic’ Black figure in these types of still life paintings - which I’m definitely in agreement with.
Hopefully this has answered the first two questions, and next Friday (or Saturday? Everyone seems to send out their newsletters on Fridays), I’ll be turning to some contemporary projects on food and art to answer the two questions below:
Why do artists have such an interest in food?
What new possibilities might food offer as an artistic medium?
Thank you for reading! Be happy. Be well.