Objects of Desire: The Modern Still Life [Hardcover]

Philip Guston (Author), Iwan Babij (Author), Georges Braque (Author), Patrick Henry Bruce (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 15, 2002

An incisive exploration of the still life genre as artists have rediscovered and reshaped it in the 20th century, Objects of Desire proves that despite the century's hostility toward older aesthetic conventions, avant-garde artists of many schools have made of the still life a vital opportunity for invention. From Matisse, Picasso, and Braque to the Dadaists, Surrealists, and Pop artists and finally to contemporary creators like Cindy Sherman and Charles Ray, the still life has hardly led a stolid, stable, or staunch existence. Originally a subject reserved for painting, the genre has progressively invaded the arena of sculpture, its themes reinvented in the provocative assemblages called "readymades," its forms recast continuously into the present. Published to accompany a major 1997 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Objects of Desire traces a radical rethinking of the genre in terms of subject matter and formal invention.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

This catalog presents the first show by the Museum of Modern Art to consider the full sweep of 20th-century artists' still lifes, one of the lasting genres of the Western tradition. After a historical introduction and a consideration of the inescapable influence of Cezanne's later works, Rowell, chief curator in the Department of Drawings, convincingly argues that the show's disparate works demonstrate a "progressive development" rather than a "radical subversion and destruction of earlier traditions." Nonetheless, the more than 130 pieces in the survey?opening with Picasso's proto-Cubist "Pitcher, Bowl, and Lemon" (1907); proceeding through Dada objects, Surrealist allegories, and Pop icons; and concluding with mostly sculptural works from the 1990s?will indicate to many readers nothing less than the eradication of the very meaning of "still life." This is perhaps the show's great accomplishment: using a "minor" genre to frame nothing less than the full progression of 20th-century art, with all its tangents and tensions. Moreover, the book provides access to works from many of the world's greatest collections and a very readable text. Highly recommended for most libraries.?Eric Bryant, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Margit Rowell is the former Chief Curator of the Department of Drawings, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 232 pages
• Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art, New York (July 15, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 087070110X
• ISBN-13: 978-0870701108
• Product Dimensions: 11.3 x 9.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #453,458 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #44 in Books > Arts & Photography > Painting > Still Life

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Dilbert in the Artplace, November 1, 2006

By 

Michael Bruno "M. Bruno" (Overland Park, Kansas) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Objects of Desire: The Modern Still Life (Hardcover)

While doing research for an essay on the "Search for Postmodernism in a Modernist World," I purchased Ms Rowell's book, curiously titled Objects of Desire. At the very least, it was a questionable investment. However, it is indicative of what is wrong with the world of modern art [or even postmodern art] where pretentious jargon takes the place of actual description, reason or discussion as an excuse for art works that in the end are just boring.

At the time of the book's publication, Ms Rowell was allegedly a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Her explanation of Postmodernism gets at the heart of the matter in such a way that I am compelled to quote her at length, in particular her explanation regarding the bridge between pastiche and schizophrenia:

"The possibility of pastiche -- its neutrality and blankness - presupposes that individualism is dead. The copy is impersonal; the model is either indifferent, forgotten, or never existed. High modernism, however, was "predicated on the invention of a personal private style... This means that the modernist aesthetic is in some way a unique personality and individuality, which can be expected to generate its own unique vision of the world, and to forge its own unique, unmistakable style." Yet today, scientists, social scientists, and cultural critics are "exploring the notion that that [sic] kind of individualism and personal identity is a thing of the past; that the old individual or individualist subject is `dead'; and that one might even describe the concept of the unique individual and the theoretical basis of individualism as ideological." Thus the old models of modernism are no longer viable. As we know, schizophrenia is defined as a basic breakdown of relationships - because objects in a perceptual field, for example and between words and their meaning or content, or between words and each other as a continuous fabric of meaning in a linguistic system. As a result, the schizophrenic has no concept of time as linear, interconnected, and sequential, and none either of personal identity as a selection and interrelation of certain specific human potentials at the expense of others. Conversely, because the schizophrenic does not (indeed cannot) search for meaning behind the object, behind the word, or within the unhierarchical unfolding of the field of experience, he or she has an experience of the present and of its objects that is "overwhelmingly vital and `material'... ever more material - or better still, literal - ever more vivid in sensory ways." ... Pashtiching the objects of desire of our traditional landscape, they set a film of meaning (or nonmeaning) between themselves and ourselves. In their deliberate displacement and disconnection from familiar circuits of meaning - whether aesthetic or real - these surrogates or simulacra embody another register of experience, that of the signs and systems of the postmodern world." [Rowell, 194-195]

Is there anything more that can be added after such an erudite analysis? Perhaps there is. However, the analysis does cause one to ask a number of questions. Did anyone buy this book for anything other than the pictures? How does one get a job as a curator in a major museum? And more to the point, was there an editor, or was the editor on vacation when page after page of turgid, incoherent and virtually incomprehensible pseudo-intellectualism made its way to print? Or perhaps this presentation is meant to be a literary representation of Postmodernism, most likely a parody of postmodern Deconstructionist style. One can only hope that this is satire - the world of Dilbert in the "artplace." Dramatic readings of her text have provided considerable entertainment for my friends and family, who found it quite amusing.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Enjoy the early plates, ignore ALL the text!, June 11, 2009

By 

Tam Mossman (Undisclosed) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Objects of Desire: The Modern Still Life (Hardcover)

This outsize book begins with some arrestingly beautiful illustrations that reward repeated viewing. But the selection stumbles when it tries to stretch the definition of "still life" to include postmodern sculptures like Jeff Koon's basketball in an aquarium and Tony Cragg's pointed objects lined up across a bare floor.

But well before that, you'll have thrown up your hands (along with your lunch) at Margit Rowell's text--written in PhDspeak, seeking to plumb new depths of academic obfuscation. For example:

"As mentioned earlier, the specific objects of a traditional still life, and their interrelations, obey a rigorously closed and articulated narrative structure, a structure of desire, 'a structure that both invents and distances its object and thereby inscribes again and again the gap between signifier and signified that is the place of negation for the symbolic' [Susan Stewart, 'On Longing']."

Purer than this, drivel doesn't come!