McMaster celebrates its artistic riches
University’s museum of art was founded 50 years ago
The McMaster Museum of Art is celebrating its 50th birthday with an exhibition of works from its permanent collection. And that involves another celebration: the permanent collection’s close ties to Herman Herzog Levy.
A Cultivating Journey: The Herman H. Levy Legacy, an exhibition at the museum, showcases more than 60 paintings, prints and ceramics. Some, like Claude Monet’s “Waterloo Bridge,” were donated to the museum by Levy in 1984. Others were bought using funds from the Levy Bequest created after his death in 1990. The exhibition also includes paintings Levy gave to the Art Gallery of Hamilton.
Born in Hamilton in 1902, Levy began collecting art in the 1920s on his travels to Europe while working for his father’s jewelry business in Hamilton.
Levy sought out historical and modern European art that included portraits, landscapes and still lifes.
Here are two still life paintings, both from the Levy Bequest Purchase.
Still life paintings have been around for more than 2,000 years. By the 17th century when Philips Breughel executed “Still Life with Pike, Barbel and Vegetables,” a still life was capable of conveying many ideas.
A still life offered pleasure by appealing to the senses or reminding the viewer of nature’s abundance. Sometimes a still life illustrated vanitas, that is, the idea that everything and everyone dies.
A still life could also advertise what someone was selling. And it could celebrate the things money can buy.
Breughel, who worked in Antwerp and Paris, paints in a baroque style: crowded, sensual and dramatic. He’s tipped the foreground slightly so that the objects look as though they are about to tumble into our laps.
The foreground is dominated by a shimmery heap of freshwater fish, including a pike in front and a barbel behind it. A cantaloupe, cut open to reveal its fleshy interior, lies to the right. Stalks of celery are scattered to the left. Thin white parsnips are strewn about.
Moving slightly up on the right, we encounter a basket filled with grapes, apricots, apples, leaves and branches. In the distance on the left, a vase of flowers sits on a ledge backlit by the sky.
Breughel’s painting invites us to look at the food — and to imagine touching, smelling and tasting it. By depicting many varied things, Breughel heightens this sensual experience.
Breughel adds drama by making the composition look as though it could fall apart at any moment. The writhing forms of the fish, for instance, appear ready to slide out of the picture. The basket with its fruit overflowing on one side could easily topple.
But modernists in the 19th century rejected such elaborate illusions of reality and the complex ideas that went with them. Instead, French artist Émile Bernard draws attention to the painting as a painting in his “Still life with Cup and Bowl of Fruit.”
By contrast to Breughel’s wide and cluttered view, Bernard comes up close to red and green fruit in a shallow bowl.
Are they apples? It doesn’t really matter. What matters here is the arrangement of forms and colours. Times have changed since the Breughel painting, where recognizing the particular types of fruit and vegetables and the species of fish was meant to be part of the delight the viewer took in the artwork.
The fruit contributes rounded shapes that are echoed by the tops of the cups on either side of the bowl. The wall adds geometric shapes. Bernard restricts movement into the distance by having the wall in the midground stop any further recession.
Breughel’s painting boasts a smooth surface. But Bernard paints rough, leaving the marks of the brush on the objects, reminding us that this is not an illusion of reality, but a painting. Regina Haggo, art historian, public speaker, curator and former professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, teaches at the Dundas Valley School of Art. dhaggo@thespec.com