KITCHEN TABLE ART

FOR the Renaissance masters, details of flowers and fruits were like armor and rich fabrics--just opportunities to show off their technical virtuosity. Their great central passages focused on what they deemed to be nature's sublime creation: man. But through the centuries the viewpoint has changed. Today still life has become for many artists an intimate proving ground for their own vision and expression. The very fact that the inanimate objects grouped together are from everyday life provides the challenge to infuse them with what one of the greatest still-life painters, Paul Cezanne* called "an impulse that only those possessed of true feelings can give."

To survey the accomplishments of artists with such commonplace subject matter (called by the French nature morte, by the Spaniards bodegones, which means "low-class restaurant or taproom"), the Milwaukee Art Institute and the Cincinnati Art Museum have teamed up to assemble an ambitious selection ot paintings covering 500 years of still life. Opening this week in Cincinnati, the exhibition ranges from an unknown German's Cabinet with Bottles and Books, dated 1470, down to such later-day works as Georges Braque's Soda and Stuart Davis' Eggbeater V; it includes works by the 17th century Dutch masters, France's Chardin and Spanish Painter Zurbaran. Far from being a drab assortment of pots and pans, dead hares and Dutch ham, the exhibit does much to prove that minor them do not preclude a major work. Says Milwaukee Art Institute Director Edward H. Dwight of their intimate yet forceful quality: "The still life is to the painter what the quartet to the composer." , ,

U.S. painters, too, have found in the richness of man's harvesting and handiwork a theme worth celebrating Raphaelle, Me (1774-1825), eldest son of Patriot-Painter Charles Wilson Peale (TIME, July 4, 1955), borrowed the glowing technique developed by the Dutch masters. His ready-for-eating apple, raisins and sugar-coated cake, by their closely observed rendering bring a glow of appreciation and recognition. Maine's late great eccentric, Marsden Hartley (1878-1943), with Flowers from Claire Spencer's Garden in a white crockery pitcher testified to his love for Maine more intimately and no less glowingly than with the blunt, powerful landscapes he did of Mt. Katahdin.

-Whose still life, Apples and Biscuits, four years ago brought $113,000 in Paris' famed Cognacq sale.

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