Art/Matter(s)

Decades ago, musing on the content of Dutch paintings in advance of her influential study, The Art of Describing (1983), Svetlana Alpers worried about why the imagery of still-life pictures proffered such enticing and abundant delights if their chief purpose was to warn viewers away from that very temptation and desire. Certainly the artistic representation of quotidian - albeit sometimes luxurious, rare, or costly - goods in paint poses one of the ultimate challenges of the Dutch art legacy and how a viewer was supposed to respond to it. Little wonder that some of the brightest minds in the discipline, including several authors in this collection, have been drawn to the same puzzling paradox that challenged Professor Alpers. Indeed, Dutch still lifes have been anything but 'overlooked', either as objects or as a pictorial genre, despite Norman Bryson's protestations in his own provocative study. Yet still lifes emphatically eliminate any distracting human figures and use all the illusionistic artifice of their oil paint technique to simulate the materiality - the very heart of the matter - of objects, what Roland Barthes in 'The world as object' calls the 'empire of things'.