Word: chardin
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...Chardin didn't say much--at least, not much that he did say has been preserved, since he had no Boswell and the gossips who adored his work, like the Goncourt brothers, came from a later generation and never met him. But there is a tantalizing remark attributed to him by a writer of the 1780s, Charles-Nicolas Cochin: "I must forget everything I have seen and even forget the way such objects have been treated by others." This hints at the extreme pride and immense ambition that underwrote Chardin's apparently modest arrangements of brown jugs, water glasses, dead...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...good painter of adults, pensive servants especially--who never, it should be noted, become illustrations for a lecture on class--but his children are marvels. A young boy, the son of one of Chardin's collectors, soberly kitted out in black tricorn hat and mole-colored coat, is attentively building a house of cards--that emblem of fragility that nonetheless does not fall. Another lad, not 10 years old, watches with the most exquisitely rendered absorption the fate of a spinning top on a writing table; it leans under the pull of gravity but is still (only just) erect...