Modern Painting and Art Made from Food

Food as a cultural symbol in modern Western European art

The lecture examines how food became a subject in Western European art in the modern era, especially after the nineteenth century. It explains that artists gradually shifted their focus from beauty, nature and realism towards social and cross-cultural meanings. Food is not always the painting’s “main character”, but it becomes a useful and flexible instrument through which ideas can be expressed outside academic rules and religious symbolism. Against a background of increasing wealth and general prosperity, food becomes a cultural sign and even an artist’s personal “marker”. The lecture proposes to examine numerous paintings to see how food reflects an artist’s style across roughly two centuries of active development and modernisation.

How the focus of Western European art changed (the modern period)

• A shift from traditional values—beauty, nature and realism—to social and cross-cultural meanings.

After the nineteenth century, art became less concerned with being “simply beautiful and lifelike” and increasingly addressed society, ideas, identities and interactions between cultures.

• Approximately two centuries of accelerated modernisation.

Artists moved away from the restrictions of academies and familiar subjects, including religious symbolism, broadening their range of subjects and means of expression. Food as a motif fits this freedom well.

Food as a cultural symbol and personal “signature”

• Food as a cultural sign against a background of growing prosperity.

As society becomes wealthier, food ceases to be only “about survival” and begins to signify status, habits, values, belonging and everyday life.

• Food as a means of creative freedom.

The motif of food helps an artist move beyond the strict rules of academic painting and “obligatory” religious images.

• Food as an artist’s personal identifier.

The choice of ingredients, the manner of depiction and the context of food within the image can become part of a recognisable artistic language, like a chef’s signature seasoning: apparently a small detail, yet enough to identify its maker.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Realism

Realists often chose subjects from the lives of the lower social classes in order to move away from idealism.

Nineteenth-century Realists took the representation of food from seventeenth-century art but “lowered” the social class of the people depicted to give their works a greater sense of truth. In Realism, food does not serve as a metaphor for something else. It is simply what it is, though it may sometimes indicate poverty or simplicity. Let us consider Claude Monet’s painting Still Life with Beef.

Put briefly: in Realism, food is a fact rather than a “symbol”. It is not an “allegory of wealth, sin or time”, but an honest piece of reality: how people live, what they eat and what their daily lives are like.

Left-hand section. Let us consider this painting by Claude Monet:

Still Life with Beef.

We see meat, but food of a relatively “ordinary” kind. This is the sort of beef used, for example, to make Swiss steak; beside it is garlic for flavour. The earthenware mug may contain beer, also used in cooking.

Such a dinner could have provided a substantial meal for a working person in nineteenth-century France. By then, almost anyone could afford meat. In paintings of this kind, artists recorded real everyday life.

Right-hand section. This does not mean, however, that social status ceased to matter.

Édouard Manet, for example, displayed refined taste and culinary sophistication in his Still Life with Carp.

Here he assembled ingredients from which a fine meal could be prepared. The fish is probably a fresh catch from a French market. It will be cooked in a stew or bouillabaisse, in the pot behind it. At this stage, we no longer see allusions to “bodily humours”—moist and dry dishes—or religious symbolism, such as the symbolism of the fish. This painting presents France as a centre of culinary taste and high-society life.

Still lifes and paintings of food became still more significant when artists began to place technique and colour harmony above the subject itself. Freed from Europe’s academic hierarchy, Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters concentrated on broad experimentation: loose, “dotted” brushwork, tonal relationships and the placement of colours on the canvas.

Impressionists and Post-Impressionists drew inspiration from natural colour schemes but reinterpreted nature through colour harmonies of their own, which could appear strikingly unnatural. Allegorical and mythological subjects are entirely absent from Impressionist still life. The play of colour, form and brushstroke can be clearly seen in this painting by Antoine Vollon. The still life depicts a mound of butter painted in a rich, deep yellow. The darker shade suggests butter made from the milk of cows grazing on fresh greenery in the countryside.

Kitchen scenes, food preparation and depictions of everyday objects were common subjects for still lifes in Vollon’s time. Every aspect of life, including domestic things, was considered worthy of the same attention.

In Antoine Vollon’s day, butter was usually bought directly from the farmer. Typically, cream was collected after milking and churned, after which pieces of butter were kneaded by hand or worked with a paddle to remove excess moisture, because a high proportion of buttermilk shortened its keeping time.

Butter was generally stored wrapped in cheesecloth in a cool place. In the painting, the cloth wrapping the butter hangs loosely beside a pair of eggs. Thick marks are visible on the butter’s surface, laid over the artist’s brushstrokes. They may deliberately suggest marks left by a knife used to spread the butter or by a wooden paddle used to smooth it, which was also employed in butter-making.

Café culture became another important subject in nineteenth-century art. Cafés had existed in Paris since the seventeenth century. They were modelled on the coffee houses of Constantinople and were initially meeting places for the elite. When social classes began to mingle in the early nineteenth century, cafés became spaces where liberals and revolutionaries gathered.

Cafés came to embody Parisian life and became important meeting places for intellectuals and artists in other major European cities as well. The café became a symbol of modern life.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, cafés grew increasingly popular with the working class. People came for food, drink and company. Over the course of a day, a worker might visit a café before starting work, at midday for an aperitif, after lunch for a digestif, and after work during the “absinthe hour”.

Works by Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas and Vincent van Gogh immortalised café life. Artists such as Manet and Degas were acute observers. They assumed the role of the flâneur, the idle observer of urban life, recording events as they saw them. Their paintings convey a spontaneous moment, an instant cut from time, like a photograph.

Édouard Manet had long been recognised as a master of depicting modern Parisian life. His first café painting, At the Café, was painted in 1878. The work captures a small fragment of the café atmosphere witnessed by Manet himself and his artist friends. A woman sits at the centre of the painting. She looks directly at the viewer. One arm rests on the back of a chair, while her other hand lies in her lap. A slight smile on her face makes her feelings difficult to read. It may be a response to the companion sitting beside her. His mouth is slightly open, but he does not engage her in conversation. Manet creates a sense of separation between the two figures, as though he had caught the woman through a camera lens. The cropped edges of the composition reinforce the scene’s photographic quality. Quick, loose brushstrokes give the painting spontaneity and contrast sharply with the smooth surface of the academic painting against which the Realists rebelled. At the Café, Édouard Manet, 1878, oil on canvas

The artist who brought still life almost to the level of abstraction, thereby paving the way for the twentieth-century Cubists, was Paul Cézanne. In still life, he found an ideal means for his revolutionary investigations into geometrical and spatial organisation. For Cézanne, still life became the principal way to free painting from its illustrative function and turn it into a demonstration of the elements of colour, form and line. This was an important step towards abstract art. His paintings inspired many generations of artists. Still life was Cézanne’s most important genre. Over four decades, he produced around two hundred such works. In Still Life with Fruit Dish, he creates a shallow, compressed space that flattens the sculptural volumes of the dish, glass and fruit. This painting was particularly precious to Paul Gauguin. He called it “an exceptional pearl, the apple of my eye”. He was forced to part with it only when he urgently needed money for medical treatment. In this work, Gauguin deliberately imitates Cézanne. We see a similarly compressed space. Gauguin replaces Cézanne’s apples with mangoes and the French floral wallpaper with cloth bearing a Tahitian pattern. One significant difference is the human figure in the top right-hand corner, barely visible through a door or window. Still Life with Teapot and Fruit, Paul Gauguin, 1896, oil on canvas, 18¾ × 26 inches (47.6 × 66 cm). Although Vincent van Gogh is widely known for his Sunflowers, his still life Drawing Board (1889) is a self-portrait in the form of a still life. According to the museum that holds the work, Van Gogh rented the Yellow House in Arles and invited Paul Gauguin to work with him. Disagreements soon developed between the artists, however. After a fierce quarrel, Van Gogh became disoriented and cut off his left ear. He was admitted to hospital in Arles and discharged on 7 January 1889. That day, he wrote to his brother Theo that he intended to begin two still lifes the following day in order to “get used to painting again”. One of them was this painting with a plate of onions, executed in contrasting colours. The tabletop is painted in almost horizontal strokes, while the background is built from vertical ones. The objects in the painting suggest that Van Gogh is returning to the routines of everyday life: a letter from Theo, a plate of onions, a pipe and tobacco, a bottle of wine or absinthe, a coffee pot, a calendar with a burning candle, a stick of sealing wax, a box of matches and, finally, the book Annuaire de la santé on proper nutrition and hygiene. All these are laid out on the table in place of an image of the artist himself. Still Life with a Plate of Onions, Vincent van Gogh, early January 1889, oil on canvas

Food in Art: the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries

• The nineteenth century—a move away from academic and religious subjects.

• An interest in everyday life, the modern city and the artist’s personal viewpoint.

• Food and still life become a useful field for experiments with colour, form and composition.

Café culture

• The café—a symbol of modern urban life.

• A place where social classes mix, converse and observe.

• The artist as flâneur, recording a moment like a photographer. Artists: Manet, Degas, Van Gogh.

Édouard Manet

• Depicts modern Parisian life.

• Uses cropped compositions and rapid brushstrokes.

• Creates a sense of an accidental, “captured” moment.

• Food and drink are part of the setting rather than symbols with predetermined meanings.

Impressionism

• Technique, colour and light take priority over subject matter.

• A rejection of allegory and mythology.

• Still life as an investigation of colour harmonies and brushwork.

Paul Cézanne

• Still life as a tool for analysing form and space.

• Compressed, flattened space.

• A rejection of the illustrative function.

• A step towards abstract art and Cubism.

Paul Gauguin

• Develops Cézanne’s ideas.

• Introduces exotic motifs: mangoes and Tahitian fabrics.

• Combines still life with elements of narrative.

Vincent van Gogh

• Still life as a self-portrait without a human figure.

• Objects reflect the artist’s inner state.

• Contrasting colour and directional brushwork intensify emotion.

Food in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art is a way of speaking about modernity, culture and the artist’s personality rather than a symbol of morality.

American artists

Across the Atlantic, American artists responded to the still-life genre in various ways. Those who trained in Europe brought European artistic styles into American portraiture and still life. Charles Willson Peale became the founder of an entire family of distinguished American artists and a key figure in the United States’ artistic community. He and his son Raphaelle Peale were among the first American artists to work in still life.

Raphaelle Peale used still life to express cultural, political and social values, turning the genre into a significant artistic language. He is regarded as America’s first truly outstanding still-life painter.

Peale was particularly interested in rendering the colour and texture of food. Most of his works depict fruit. Such paintings generally decorated dining rooms. Cutlet and Vegetables is one of only two known works by the artist to depict meat and vegetables. It is also Peale’s largest surviving still life.

Cutlet and Vegetables, Raphaelle Peale, 1816, oil on panel, 46.4 × 61.5 cm.

Food in genre painting and social conflict

Food in genre painting also reflected the social tensions of its time in America.

For example, The Epicure, painted by Francis William Edmonds in 1838, is considered one of the earliest depictions of a tavern meal in American art.

The painting was made in 1838, shortly before the beginning of the Civil War. It depicts a stout Northern businessman eating beef and drinking port, while a thin farmer and his wife try to sell him a suckling pig.

It offers a harsh critique of the simple, rural South, traditionally associated with pig farming, from the perspective of the industrial and decadent North, associated with beef.

The Epicure, Francis William Edmonds, 1838.

The illusion of reality and still life in the second half of the nineteenth century

In the second half of the nineteenth century, trompe-l’œil, or optical illusion painting, flourished in America through artists such as John Frederick Peto. At the same time, William Joseph McClosky’s still lifes of paper-wrapped citrus fruit became well known. These works achieved worldwide recognition and belong to the same period.

Still Life with Cake, Lemon, Strawberries and Glass, John Frederick Peto, 1890, oil on canvas, 25.72 × 35.4 cm. Wrapped Oranges, William Joseph McClosky, 1889, oil on canvas, 30.4 × 40.6 cm.

Oranges as a symbol of luxury and packaging

McClosky’s works featuring paper-wrapped citrus fruit make a strong impression through their colour and almost photographic realism. Bright fruit against dark backgrounds and polished wooden surfaces creates a powerful visual effect. On the east coast of the United States, oranges were still rare at the time. They had to be brought from warmer regions. Paper wrapping appeared in the late nineteenth century to protect fruit from damage and spoilage while it was transported in wooden crates. Because of their rarity, oranges were often given as gifts, and the wrapping paper also served as gift wrap. The earliest wrappers from this period were simple and plain: white, yellow, pink or blue.

Later, around the turn of the twentieth century, producers began to print information on the paper: farm names, the fruit’s place of origin, logos and illustrations.

The twentieth century—Cubists and Dada

Building on Cézanne’s techniques of shifting planes and axes, the Cubists muted the Fauves’ bright palette and focused on breaking objects down into pure geometrical forms and planes. Between 1910 and 1920, artists such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris produced numerous still lifes. Musical instruments often appeared in them. Almost for the first time, still life stood at the centre of artistic experimentation and innovation. Still Life with Pitcher and Piece of Bread, Pablo Picasso, 1936.

Rejecting the Cubist “flattening” of space, Marcel Duchamp and other participants in the Dada movement took a radically different direction, creating three-dimensional “readymade” still lifes. Seeking to restore symbolic meaning to still life, Futurists and Surrealists placed recognisable still-life objects in their dreamlike, unreal spaces. Sculpture-morte, or “dead sculpture”, is often compared with the Renaissance portraits of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, although a face is quite difficult to discern in it. The paper serving as its background identifies the maker of the marzipan vegetables: the confectioner Bonnevie of Perpignan. The name Bonnevie, literally “good life”, and the making of “still lifes”—nature morte, “dead nature”, in French—form a play on words characteristic of Duchamp. Sculpture-morte, Marcel Duchamp, 1959. Marzipan fruit and vegetables, insects and paper mounted on wood, in a glass box, 33.8 × 22.5 × 9.9 cm.

When twentieth-century American artists encountered European Modernism, they began interpreting still life by combining American Realism with abstraction derived from Cubism. Marsden Hartley’s works are characteristic of American food still life in this period. Still Life No. 2, Marsden Hartley, 1921–1923, oil on canvas, 54.6 × 91.8 cm.

In Mexico from the 1930s onwards, Frida Kahlo and other artists created their own version of Surrealism, incorporating local produce and cultural motifs into still lifes. Artists such as Kahlo addressed national identity through food. Frida Kahlo’s art reflects her personal experience and interest in Mexican folk art. Images of birth and rebirth appear in her works, along with skeletons, bleeding hearts and other symbols. In this painting, the pitaya—an edible cactus fruit with a tough skin and juicy flesh—symbolises nature’s bounty. The cut fruit may refer to sexuality, as well as to Kahlo’s own injured body following the serious accident she experienced in her youth. Pitahayas, Frida Kahlo, 1938, oil on aluminium, 25.4 × 35.6 cm.

Still life in the twenty-first century. Fernando Botero

1. Still life today Still life is not an outdated genre.

It remains relevant for as long as an artist has something to remember and record. Objects become a way to preserve a moment, a state of mind or a personal experience.

2. Fernando Botero as an example of contemporary still life Botero shows that still life can be alive and contemporary. He uses the same artistic language for people, objects and spaces.

3. Botero’s artistic language

• Form: rounded, massive, volumetric objects.

Objects look as though they have “come alive”. The style is readily recognisable in any subject.

• Colour: bright, saturated and emphasising the materiality of the world.

• Figures: depicted in everyday life, with detached gazes. They are simultaneously familiar and a little “out of place”.

4. Nostalgia as a central theme Botero’s work is rooted in nostalgia for the world of his youth and his homeland. The artist deliberately returns to personal memory as a source of images.

5. Still life in Botero’s work Food and domestic things are more than objects.

They are instruments for expressing his view of the world.

Through still life, the artist conveys memories, identity and a relationship with the past.

Still life remains a relevant genre in the twenty-first century.

It works when objects become bearers of the artist’s memory, meaning and personal experience.

Food in art is not about food

The lecture discussed how art changed and how the role of food in painting changed with it.

Before, everything was straightforward. Paintings were commissioned. A still life with food showed status, prosperity and the order of the world. Bread, fruit and game on the table amounted almost to a report on society’s life.

Then the world shifted. Artists ceased to be mere executors of commissions. Art became a personal statement. And food ceased to be an “object”. It became a way of thinking.

Still life did not disappear. It survived because it proved flexible. Through food, artists began to speak about themselves, their time and their country. Not “what we eat”, but “who we are”.

European artistic styles spread around the world, particularly to the Americas. Yet there they were not copied blindly. Techniques were adopted; meanings changed. Local food became an occasion to discuss a distinct identity and pride in it. An important idea from the lecture is simple and powerful: food in art is a lens. Through it, we can see society, culture, conflict, joy and memory.

This approach will also work beyond painting. In performance, literature, photography and cinema, food everywhere says more than it seems to at first glance.

Sometimes a plate in a painting is not about dinner at all. It is about a country, a time and a person.

Retrospective Bust of a Woman, Salvador Dalí, 1933 In 1931, Dalí described Surrealist sculpture as “absolutely useless and created solely to materialise, in fetishistic form and with the greatest possible tangible reality, ideas and fantasies of a delirious nature”.

Only two years later, he created the following sculpture: Retrospective Bust of a Woman.

In this sculpture, Dalí presents a woman as an object, specifically an object intended for consumption.

A long, phallic baguette crowns her head; ears of maize hang around her neck; and ants crawl across her forehead as though collecting crumbs.

Salvador Dalí, Retrospective Bust of a Woman, 1933

(some elements reconstructed in 1970).

Painted porcelain, bread, maize, feathers, paint on paper; beads, an inkwell, sand and two pens. 29 × 27¼ × 12⅝ inches (73.9 × 69.2 × 32 cm)

The sculpture Floor Burger, originally Giant Hamburger. Claes Oldenburg became interested in Pop Art after moving to New York in 1956. While artists such as Warhol and Lichtenstein drew inspiration from mass culture, Oldenburg found his muse in hamburgers, fans, bagels and other familiar objects. Philosophically, Oldenburg considered himself a Realist. Yet he took objects from the real world and placed them outside their context, making soft what should be hard and enormous what should be small. Floor Burger, Claes Oldenburg, 1962. Canvas filled with foam rubber and cardboard boxes, painted with acrylic paint. 132.1 × 226.1 cm.

“I like working with very simple ideas,” Oldenburg said. “It seemed entirely natural to me that, if you like touching things, you like touching soft things as much as hard ones. If you are going to make sculpture from the real things around you, why not try making them soft, so that you can push them and they change shape? They had to be stuffed. That was very important. There were different ways of stuffing—you could stuff them tightly or loosely. These large objects were so big, and their interiors required so much filling, that I decided to stuff them with boxes. These enormous objects were inspired by grand pianos on 57th Street or cars in showrooms. Objects that were too large for the shops containing them. We did not make them downtown and bring them here—we made them right in the gallery.” When Floor Burger first appeared, it caused considerable controversy. It does not stimulate the appetite: it is a “dead hamburger”. It is an anti-monument, an anti-hero. It is crushed by its own weight and size. The intention was to challenge popular culture. When the Art Gallery of Ontario acquired the work in 1967, art students made a 2.7-metre-high ketchup bottle in protest at the purchase of Oldenburg’s work. Fifty students, together with their teachers, marched with the bottle in front of the gallery and then attempted to donate it, but the gallery refused to accept it.

The Dinner Party—Judy Chicago

The Dinner Party is a monumental ceremonial banquet arranged on a triangular table with thirty-nine place settings, each dedicated to an important woman in history, such as Sacagawea, the Byzantine Empress Theodora, Virginia Woolf and Georgia O’Keeffe.

The settings consist of embroidered runners, gold goblets and cutlery, and porcelain plates with raised central motifs based on vulval and butterfly forms. The style of each setting was designed to reflect the woman to whom it is dedicated and was made by hand by the artist. The names of a further 999 women are inscribed in gold on the white tiled floor beneath the triangular table. Judy Chicago, 1974–79. Ceramics, porcelain and textiles. 1,463 × 1,463 cm.

The artist’s aim in this work is to present the richness of women’s heritage through a monumental artwork. It is widely considered the first epic feminist artwork. The work is highly symbolic and almost a staging of the Last Supper. It is a formal dinner that identifies and celebrates each woman through what appears on the table. Unsurprisingly, it received varied criticism: some found it emotional and moving, others vulgar and kitsch. Over time, responses became more positive, and the work is now recognised as an important feminist artwork.

Food as a political object—A Subtlety (sugar sculpture)

Dominated by an enormous sugar-coated female sphinx with distinctively Black features, a headscarf and earrings, this work is both beautiful and disturbing.

It makes a statement about slavery and honours the unnamed enslaved people who worked in the sugar industry. The sphinx was 75 feet long and 35 feet high, approximately 23 metres long and 11 metres high. Around forty tonnes of sugar were used to coat the surface, applied by hand to a polystyrene structure.

Kara Walker, A Subtlety (Sugar Baby), 2014. Polystyrene blocks and sugar, 75 feet long and 35 feet high.

This sculpture was installed in the Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg, New York, which in the nineteenth century produced half the sugar consumed in the United States. A prolonged strike took place here in 2000: 250 workers protested against pay and working conditions for twenty months. The factory has now been demolished and replaced with offices and apartments. Walker’s work also became a work about that factory and its destruction.

Food as a means of displaying craftsmanship

Sometimes food in sculpture is intended to be more accessible and carries no strong symbolism or political message.

We will not explore the commercial reasons for creating these works or discuss their value within the art world. Nevertheless, they are notable projects, whether made by independent artists or well-known fashion houses.

In 2017, British artist Lucy Sparrow recreated an entire supermarket called Sparrow Mart in Los Angeles, filled with 31,000 felt sculptures. The shop was an updated version of Cornershop, Sparrow’s successful 2014 London project based on a shop selling British goods, and of 8 ’till late, a larger installation in New York in 2017. The artist also created another shop, Delicatessen on 6th, in New York in 2019. The art looks very realistic, sweet and “plush”.

An image from Sparrow Mart—a supermarket created from felt sculptures.