Urbane meditations on the history and meaning of the still life in
art and literature. Essayist, poet, translator, and fiction writer
Davenport (The Cardiff Team, 1996, etc.) takes as his subject the
idea of the still life in art. However, he doesn't offer any sort
of academically systematic treatise of the topic. Instead, it's
more accurate to say that he takes the idea of harmonious disarray
in art as a way of focusing and stimulating his own wide-ranging
and historically literate imagination. Here is a conservative
sample of the Davenport mode of verbal meditation: "The pipe begins
to appear in Renaissance still lifes as a memento mori: life passes
away like smoke. An extinguished candle usually accompanied a pipe,
and books and food and musical instruments added up to the vanity
of our brief life. The nineteenth century would transmute these
symbols into ones of peace, cosiness, and domesticity, until in
Picasso and Braque they are emblems of shrinking privacy, the
precious vestiges of harmony in a distracting and insane world."
Sometimes his leaps of imagination and lists of connections strain
credulity. This kind of thing can be dazzling or irritating,
depending on how you feel about argument and documentation.
Davenport knows this, of course, and aims by virtue of his book's
"disarray of perceptions and conjunctions" to charm his consenting
partner into a like state of meditation on van Gogh, on Nietzsche,
on Edgar Allen Poe, on the persistence of apples and pears in the
Western imagination, on the assemblage of objects on Sherlock
Holmes's desk at 221B Baker Street. Davenport has the wonderful
ability to "read" inanimate objects in their historical setting,
and he seems to remember everything he ever read. The range of
allusion is immense and challenging and rewarding. Davenport is a
virtuoso of the literary essay, and here the magic mostly works.
(Kirkus Reviews)
Davenports meditations on the still life dip into the full history
of this art formfrom Neolithic cave paintings to the Dutch masters,
from Czanne and Van Gogh to photography and the collage.. In a
series of four meditations on still-life painting, Guy Davenport
blends art history with literary criticism, taking a close look at
the iconic and symbolic function of objects and the multiple ways
they are represented in culture. Focusing on a genre that is
supposedly static, these essays reveal the dynamic forces that
motivate and shape the still life, explaining why and how painters
have employed this genre to such vital effect. In a series of four
meditations on still-life painting, Guy Davenport blends art
history with literary criticism, taking a close look at the iconic
and symbolic function of objects and the multiple ways they are
represented in culture. As always in Davenports eclectic and
provocative work, specific themes or images that appear simple on
the surface--apple and pear, a bust of Sherlock Holmes--resonate
across human history to yield a rich interplay of meaning and
story. Whether ancient or modern--an image found within an Egyptian
tomb or a painting by van Gogh, a verse from the Book of Amos or a
passage from Joyce--the works that Davenport discusses are parsed
and analyzed for the clues within silent objects (the fruit basket,
the postage stamp, the clock) with brilliant erudition. Feats of
maverick detective work, Davenports readings of art never fail to
surprise and inform.Focusing on a genre that is ostensibly static,
these meditations reveal the dynamic forces that motivate and shape
the use of still life, explaining why and how painters have
employed this form to such vital effect. As Davenport says here,
Culture is like a magnetic field, a patterned energy shaping
history. It is invisible, even unsuspected, until a receiver
sensitive enough to pick up its messages can give it a voice. When
Ezra Pound said that poets are the antennae of the race, he meant
radio antennae, not insects only. Readers, whether they are
newcomers or devoted fans of Davenports extraordinary work, will
discover that Objects on a Table broadcasts the energy of cultural
patterns in a way that will awaken them to the music within.
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