Remembrance of things past RISD’s Better Still:Looking at Still Life In the Museum Collection BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Pity the poor still life. For most of art history, when it wasn’t being trivialized, it was being overlooked. The RISD Museum is doing its part to remedy that, with Better Still: Looking At Still Life In the Museum Collection. If you haven’t caught the exhibition yet, there are plenty of reasons to get going.

"What we’ve tried to do is to interweave different elements," said Maureen O’Brien, curator of painting and sculpture. The idea was to take "the simplicity of still lifes and overlay the historical and literary sentiment in representations."

Coincidentally, a still life painting course was going to be offered this spring by Donna Bruton, dean of graduate studies, so the pair pored over some 60 to 100 still life paintings in the collection of the teaching museum, and selected 27. (Only about two to three percent of the museum’s 80,000-piece collection — about 2400 are paintings and sculptures — is on view at any particular time.)

Walking about the exhibition, O’Brien noted that in Western art, still life studies trace back to images on walls of Greek houses and Roman villas.

"It really took off as a genre in the 17th century," she pointed out. "But there are elements of still lifes in Renaissance paintings — ceramic objects in religious altarpieces, for example."

Such paintings depict things, and things can convey status. The Egyptians and other cultures went so far as to bury their wealthy dead with objects that would remind them in the afterlife of their high position. Similarly, the rising merchant class in 17th-century Europe were impressed by their prosperity.

"The Dutch were developing a very strong middle class that liked to show off what it owned, what material goods it possessed. So still lifes would be painted to be hung in their dining rooms," the curator explained. "It was all about one’s self-esteem, one’s position in society."

Some of the earliest still lifes were paintings of dead game, which at first glance does not look like an obvious display of ostentation. "Of course, people who were able to hunt were people who had the permission to hunt — they were aristocrats who would hunt on the king’s preserves or the nobleman’s preserves," O’Brien said. "So displaying the bounty of the hunt was another way to display your wealth and your connection to the aristocracy."

Of course, if you have a lot of fancy possessions lying around, sooner or later they can morph into reminders that things change, that you and your loved ones, being things also, will die. "Pipe and Mug" (post-1889), by John Frederick Peto, heightens the reality of the painting with invisible brushstrokes and includes several mementi mori, reminders of death and the passage of time: burned matches, cracker crumbs, the battered binding of a book. This vanitas painting tradition has several examples in the exhibition, including one of Joseph Cornell’s celebrated boxes. "Untitled (White Sand Fountain)" (ca. 1949-52) has a small, broken glass goblet spilling sand, as though through an hourglass.

On display in Better Still are representative Cubist examples by Braque, LŽger, and Gris, showing how convenient the genre was for depicting space breaking into multi-perspective planes and facets. Matisse’s "Still Life With Lemons" (1919) is here, as is one of the many studies of apples Cezanne did — at one point he grew annoyed with having to replace wilted flowers in his studio.

With a still life painting, Georgia O’Keeffe won a scholarship to the Art Students’ League, where she studied in 1907 and 1908, wall text informs us. Her 1922 painting on display, "Vase of Flowers," on the one hand depicts the subject with restrained realism, but goes on to embolden the canvas with outlandish pink flames of petals. They rise out of frame, reminding us of her later works that grew voluptuous with such floral forms.

"Women in the 19th century were thought to be appropriate painters for still lifes," O’Brien noted as she looked over the painting. "It was just a nice thing for women to do. They could paint flowers and they didn’t have to tax themselves too much. Here O’Keeffe takes on the subject of still life painting and then she explodes it into her signature [style]."

One sculpture in the exhibition reminds us that artists have options besides trompe l’oeil to lift a study off of a canvas. "Still Life" (1963) by Louise Bourgeois is a sculpture of a basket of fruit. Using three dimensions underscores the thingness of the objects. She further stresses that line and form are her real concern here by eliminating color — the shapes are black or white or both — and also by providing two adjoining white shapes that may or may not be boulles of bread.

Many of these works intend mainly to celebrate whatever is under examination — especially if they are beautiful flowers or luscious fruit. Sometimes it is the artist’s own contribution to the image that, upon closer examination, comes to the foreground for us. Don Eddy’s photo-realistic painting "Peaches, Tomatoes, Watermelons (Supermarket Window I)" (1972) at first glance offers mainly its orderly rows of colorful produce tilted toward us beneath a bold price sign in a window. The tomatoes’ cellophane glistens like the sheen on wet rubies. Then we see that reflections from the street and angled fluorescent lights inside the store are getting equal emphasis. If we read the wall text, we learn that the artist reproduced this from black-and-white photographs, so the colors emerged from his imagination rather than from the scene.

The most resonant work here fills the corner of a room, but it is even more imposing psychologically than physically. Displayed at the museum in a 2001-’02 presentation of Ann Hamilton’s conceptual work, "malediction" (1991) fits into a still life show in an unintentionally punning way. A life can’t be more still than when a body is in a casket. A 19th-century wicker basket, with pallbearer hand-holds, is on a table next to an enamel wash basin. From a speaker at the right, a woman’s voice softly intones Walt Whitman’s life-celebrating "Song of Myself" without inflection.

"This is a most brilliant addition to the exhibition, as far as we were concerned," the curator declared. "It had all the elements of still life: it had the table, it had the basket on the table, and it had nourishment on the table. But the irony of the nourishment is that what Hamilton did [at the installation’s SoHo unveiling] was sit in a chair, take lumps of dough, put them in her mouth, make an impression, transfer her own self onto them, and then put them in a basket, where they hardened and became inedible. So there’s a strange dichotomy of nourishment and the inability to nourish, placed in what is actually a 19th-century wicker casket. So if you didn’t get the memento mori with the tooth marks in the bread, then you certainly see it in the casket on the table."

As the works of Hamilton and others prove in this show, the often neglected genre of still lifes can be as vital as any other.

Better Still:Looking At Still Life In the Museum CollectionAt the RISDMuseum through May 2.