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Ever since its emergence at the turn of the seventeenth century, the aesthetic body of Dutch still life painting has been hamstrung by iconography. Viewed through the magnific lens of Britannica Online, iconography is “the science of identification, description, classification, and interpretation of symbols, themes, and subject matter in the visual arts. The term can also refer to the artist's use of this imagery in a particular work.” In iconographical discourse, the text most frequently inscribed in or on still life painting is said to be the vanitas. This definition may be shopworn but it is accurate as far as it goes. Vanitas embraces both senses of the term “vainness”: futility and conceit.

This chapter situates Murry's first novel, Still Life, within the frameworks of his friendship with D.H. and Frieda Lawrence and his intimate relationship with Katherine Mansfield. It discusses the impact of Lawrence's ideas about sexuality on Murry's treatment of sex in Still Life, and also takes up the issues of repressed homosexuality and homosocial desire in his friendships with Lawrence, Gordon Campbell, and Gaudier-Brzeska. Mansfield's bisexuality is discussed in relation to Murry's treatment of lesbianism in his novel. The chapter analyses Murry's writing process and his difficulty in following nineteenth-century narrative conventions to write a modernist novel.

This chapter contains an intertextual reading of Murry's Still Life and Lawrence's Women in Love. It considers the ways that Murry's ambivalent friendship with Lawrence is reflected in Women in Love. Using both the first and final versions of Women in Love, this chapter analyses Lawrence's changing interpretations of the homosocial/homosexual relationship between Gerald Crick and Rupert Birkin and argues that they evoke some of the traumatic incidents that occurred during Murry and Mansfield's visit to the Lawrences in Cornwall in 1916.

This chapter analyzes Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927). It diverges from the critical commonplace that aligns the form of To the Lighthouse with Lily Briscoe's painting and claims instead that the novel unfolds the iconographic implications of a still-life composition. The carefully arranged dish of fruit and a seashell on the Ramsays' table signals the novel's interest in minor, everyday objects and also establishes a vanitas motif—a reminder of mortality and the impermanence of human life. Woolf's still life metamorphoses into various vanitas forms throughout the novel, precipitating later turns of the plot and linking up with the novel's elegiac project. All these vanitas motifs are thus mortal forms that help to determine the shape and flow of the narrative, which is itself a mortal form—hopelessly entangled with human emotion, fated to reckon with mortality, and challenged to mourn the dead. In this way Woolf, like James, requires one to modify the notion that the modernist novel is best approached as a spatial form.

The chapter begins with an intertextual reading of Mansfield's short story, ‘Bliss’ and Murry's Still Life. That reading emphasises differences between Murry and Mansfield in their fictional treatment of the concept of ‘bliss’, female sexuality, bisexuality, and the power dynamics of marriage. The chapter then explores the ways that Murry's and Mansfield's relations with Lady Ottoline Morrell underlie the structure of ‘Bliss’. It considers how these relations mark a general shift from the influence of Lawrence to that of Bloomsbury on Murry and Mansfield.

This chapter presents early European still life insect paintings. Artists referred to cultural practices related to displaying the natural world such as kuntskammers and natural history in the formation of aesthetic conventions for this new genre. The chapter initially looks at the objects present in early floral still life paintings, where insects can be a frequent sight along with shells, coins, and so on. It also explains that European collectors actually prefer small items like coins and medals for their size and durability, making them easy to preserve in still life paintings as evident in Jan Van Kessel (the Elder)’s insect still life.

This chapter ventures to read the trompe-l’oeil of Dutch still life paintings as a trace of the self-referentiality of the illuminated manuscript page of the late fifteenth century, which is characterized by trompe-l’oeils and other features that thematize its own materiality and mediality (like for instance its two-dimensionality or its verticality). Departing from the observation of strange phenomena in Jan van Kessel’s small copper plates depicting insects and other natural objects, and the excessive trompe-l’oeils in the book illuminations of Joris Hoefnagel, which involve the fact that a book page has a recto and a verso side, the text argues that the Dutch still life emerged from the margins, edges, and borders of Flemish illuminated book manuscripts, that were constantly reinterpreted as represented objects. It is the re-entry of the material carrier into the imaginary pictorial space, that keeps generating the trompe-l’oeil. The Dutch still life is thus the pictorialized, ongoing, unarrestable collapse of the distinction between material carrier and painted object. The trompe-l’oeil appears as a symptom of the suppressed late medieval order of co-presence and the figural in the sense of Jean-François Lyotard, and thus also as a symptom of the media genealogy of representation itself.

This introduction introduces the shifting terms and characteristics historically ascribed to the still life genre, in order to open up a more nuanced discussion of the significance of stillness and still life for modern cultural practices across different media, in literature, painting, sculpture and dance. The still life paintings of the French Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) are paradigmatic in this exploration of modern still life and the phenomenon of the ‘animate inanimate’. This introduction examines a range of textual responses to his still lifes by Virginia Woolf, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wassily Kandinsky and (in an extended exploration) D.H. Lawrence, in order to explore a constellation of motifs, concerns and desires that shape the still life in the ‘age of speed’.

This chapter analyses a group of films that are set against the background of the construction of the Three Gorges Dam Project and the impending flooding of the area: Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (2002), In Expectation (1996), and Still Life (2006). These films bear testimony to the ruthless physical eradication of cities, towns, villages, and communities. This is the result of reckless modernization under the reign of instrumental rationality that treats nature as a “standing reserve” awaiting human appropriation.

Like the tableau vivant, the cinematic still life experienced a stunning revival and reinvention in the late twentieth century. In contrast to the stereotypically postmodern overload of images, the still life in film initiates a moment of repose and contemplation within a medium more often defined by the forward rush of moving pictures. It also involves a profound meditation on the relationship between images and objects consistent with practices as diverse as the Spanish baroque still life and the Surrealist variation on the genre. With the work of Terence Davies and Alain Cavalier’s Thérèse (1986) as its primary touchstones, this chapter situates this renewed interest in the cinematic still life within the context of both the late twentieth-century cinema of painters and a socially oriented art cinema that focuses on marginal people and overlooked objects rather than the hegemonic historical narratives also undergoing a revival at the time.

The relationship between still life, spiritual contemplation and the ‘numinous’ comes to the foreground in the work of British painters, Winifred Nicholson, Ben Nicholson, David Jones and Ivon Hitchens, in the context of the artists’ different commitments to the ‘spiritual’, from Christian Science to Catholic theology. This chapter proposes that still life - and in particular the ‘still life at a window motif’ - functions in their work as a mode through which to explore the relationship between the material and the immaterial, as well as to tease out fundamental aesthetic questions. It offers close readings of their still life and flower paintings of the 1920s and early 30s and of writings by contemporary collectors and by the artists, to make the case for the emergence of an ‘enchanted’ domesticity in their circle, which was intimately related to still life and its transformation of the everyday object world. It concludes with an excursion into Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, the former home of Jim Ede, the collector and friend of the Nicholsons, to propose a reading of his domestic space as an extended still life.

When Virginia Woolf sought to evoke Roger Fry’s qualities as an art critic, she reached for the image of him as a humming-bird hawk-moth, ‘quivering yet still’ in his absorbed attention to Post-Impressionist paintings. This chapter argues that modes of ‘active’ stillness and receptive, vibratory states of being were crucial to Woolf’s experience and representation of art. It traces ‘quivering’ as a talismanic word across a range of her fiction and non-fiction, and explores the pervasive figure of the insect in Woolf’s re-imagining of the human sensorium, with particular focus on her essay Walter Sickert: A Conversation (1934), and on Sketch of the Past (1939). The second half of the chapter addresses Woolf’s underexplored biography of Roger Fry and her confrontation with the problem of ‘writing’ Fry under the imperative not to ‘fix’ her subject, but rather to register his ‘vibratory’ non-physical presence. It considers the role of vibration more widely in Woolf’s life-writing and in Fry’s art theory, in the context of twentieth-century spiritualism, Quakerism and new communication technologies. It proposes that by examining the different functions and meanings of still life (visual and verbal) in Woolf’s and Fry’s work, we can further illuminate their approach to the relationship between art and life.

Documentary film in the PRC has become an important mode in the palate of Sixth Generation (or urban or independent) filmmaking. The recent prominence of documentary turns on the notion of indexicality and the capacity for film to present reality. Jia Zhangke, probably the most critically acclaimed of Sixth Generation filmmakers, in his film practice, though largely conforming to this long-take, observational documentary style, also brazenly deploys technologies such as nondiegetic music and CGI effects. On the face of it, these tactics may seem to undermine the indexical reality portrayed in Jia’s films, but on further consideration actually augment his historical project of capturing China’s contemporary moment.

In still-life painting, particularly in seventeenth-century Netherlandish art, mimetic and illusionistic realism is extreme and refined, but it does not exhaust the meaning of the painting. Beneath their material covering of canvas, wood panel, images, and colors, the things depicted in these paintings conceal precise and encoded symbolic values—and, by their very nature, symbols connect what is visibly represented to what is invisibly absent; thus grapes allude to the blood of Christ or oysters to sexual pleasure. The vegetables, fruits, cut flowers, game, fish, and shellfish in these pictures are all things painted for the pleasure and enjoyment of people. They appear suspended between their ephemeral or recently extinguished life and their death, between their solid visible form and the evanescent perspective of their imminent dissipation or decomposition. They testify at one and the same time to the pleasures of life and the desire to take advantage of those pleasures before it is too late, to the fulfillment of all five senses and their progressive weakening, to happy moments and their passing, and to the usefulness and beauty of everyday goods and their transitory nature.

China’s Three Gorges Dam is the largest hydroelectric megadam in world history and the subject of Jia Zhangke’s digital film Still Life (2006), Liu Xiaodong’s oil paintings, and Yang Yi’s digital photographs. Built in part to address the problems of global warming, the dam has had a number of surprising effects on the environment and has led to massive displacement of people to make way for the water. Jia populates his film with migrant workers, refugees, tourists, visitors, and even aliens from outer space, none of whom are at home in this world. Jia captures the city at the moment of its undoing, a place that is changing, he remarks, too fast for film. Reading Jia’s film together with Liu and Yang’s artwork and through the genre of still life painting, the chapter argues that Jia’s film envisions a kind of minimal hospitality that emerges when the world is past.

Chapter 3 explores Beckett’s relationship with the Romanian-Jewish painter Avigdor Arikha. After long practicing as an abstract painter, in 1965 Arikha committed himself to working “from observation”. His painting breaks with the traditions of Cézanne and Matisse, and was inspired by his discovery of Caravaggio. The chapter analyzes Arikha’s painting and Beckett’s later theatre through their shared aesthetic values and common interest in Caravaggio. Beckett’s plays like Come and Go, Footfalls and Not I are viewed as the realization of tableau and as a staging of the emergence of the human as thing.

Chapter 3 approaches the cinema of Jia Zhangke from two angles: first, a complex mechanism of multivalent and metanarrative subject positions in and beyond the cinematic frame compels the spectator to a highly active and conscious process of taking up history and image critically; second, it proposes the concept of “surface” to highlight Jia’s cinematic texture through various figurations of superficial time and superficial space in Xiao Wu, Platform, Unknown Pleasures and Still Life. Lou Ye’s highly expressionist and kinetic works conflate screen subjectivities with directorial and spectatorial ones. An analysis of two films by Lou Ye, Suzhou River and Purple Butterfly, demonstrates that, despite the two auteurs’ difference in style, they share a highly comparable epistemological interest in the relationship between history, representation and subjectivity.

For fifteen years Susana de Sousa Dias has been exploring the archive of the António de Oliveira Salazar regime, which ruled Portugal for forty-eight years (until the Carnation Revolution), through the cinema produced by the regime and through the photographic records the regime made of those who resisted it: that is, mugshots of men and women who became political prisoners. The resulting films sometimes recall Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests as well as Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah—and were inspired by the work of Italians Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi. In Still Life de Sousa Dias explores within imagery filmed as propaganda for the Salazar regime, looking for symptoms of its brutality; and in 48 she explores the experiences of those whose mugshots we see, through personal reminiscences.