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Norton Simon Museum’s “Art and the Essence of Food” exhibition enters its final two weeks

On view until August 14, 2023, the exhibition “All Consuming: Art and the Essence of Food” explores how artists responded to and shaped food cultures in Europe from 1500 to 1900

Source: Norton Simon Museum · Image: Frans Snyders (Flemish, 1579-1657), “Still Life with Fruit and Vegetables”, 1625-35, oil on canvas, 68-1/4 x 101 in. (173.4 x 256.5 cm), The Norton Simon Foundation

Food and drink appear nearly everywhere in the history of European art, in depictions of luscious fruits and vegetables, sumptuous feasts and bustling markets. Such images not only offer aesthetic appeal of comestibles but also reveal actions and dynamics—indulging, abstaining, buying, selling, making, growing, craving and sharing—that give food profound social meaning. The objects on view, some 60 paintings, prints, photographs and sculptures from the Norton Simon’s collections, examine a range of relationships with eating and drinking, both positive and negative, organized thematically into sections titled “Hunger,” “Excess” and “Sustenance.”

Hunger, an invisible sensation, presents a challenge for artists. It can be represented though physically gaunt figures like those in Francisco de Goya’s Disasters of War series, or implied through relationships of asking and giving, as in Rembrandt’s tender print of a rural migrant family at the door of a wealthy city dweller. Several of the works in this section were created during moments of food insecurity witnessed by the artists themselves, who employed confrontational or sympathetic visual strategies to convey these experiences. Hunger is shown with different faces, as something to be feared, remedied or even admired, in the case of weathered hermit monks who suppress bodily needs to pursue spiritual goals.

“Excess” explores depictions of morally questionable consumption, which were shaped by historically specific attitudes about gender, class and race. For instance, the satirist William Hogarth’s widely circulated print Gin Lane, published the same year that Britain’s restrictive Gin Act was enacted, depicts the effects of the perceived vice associated with London’s poorer classes. Reformers were particularly dogmatic about perceived failures of motherhood, centrally illustrated in Hogarth’s print by a gin-drunk woman with bared breasts, who reaches clumsily into her snuffbox while her child tumbles from her arms. Indulgent and potentially addictive goods like tobacco, coffee and chocolate, often imported from European colonies, inspired sexualized depictions of eating and drinking inflected with racial stereotypes. In Achille Devéria’s Odalisque, a woman in an exoticized “Eastern” costume reclines on a divan. A tray of coffee sits to her right, and she exhales a puff of smoke from her cigarette, her body displayed for the viewer’s visual consumption.

In “Sustenance,” images of food emphasize comfort and plenty, connected, particularly in northern Europe, to land, labor and commerce. Seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish still-life paintings, while almost scientific in their naturalism, offer fantastical images of abundance. In Frans Snyders’s spectacular depiction of a stocked larder, the luminously painted citrus, berries and gourds would have grown in different seasons and regions, yet they appear together in heaping mounds. Snyders painted these oversized scenes for elite urban patrons who idealized agrarian living but primarily purchased produce in city markets. In 19th-century France, increased political interest in rural labor led artists such as Camille Pissarro to focus on those who cultivated and sold food. The Poultry Market at Pontoise positions the viewer as a shopper, enveloped by the crowd. Pissarro, a critic of capitalism and mass production, celebrates the social interactions of the marketplace over its wares. Only a basket of eggs and a few ducks in the corners indicate the vendors’ specialties.

Remedios Varo: very real fantasies

From July 29 through November 27, 2023, the Art Institute of Chicago presents the exhibition “Remedios Varo: Science Fictions”

Source: Art Institute of Chicago · Image: Remedios Varo. “Armonía” (Harmony), 1956. Collection Eduardo F. Costantini. © 2023 Remedios Varo, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VEGAP, Madrid.

This exhibition includes more than 60 paintings and drawings by the Spanish-born, Mexico City-based artist created between 1955 until her death in 1963. While this chapter of Varo’s career measured less than a decade, it represents her grappling with a lifetime of ideas and demonstrates her lasting contribution to modern art and the global legacies of Surrealism. Varo was part of a remarkable community of artists working in Mexico, and while her impact has garnered recognition there, this is the first museum exhibition devoted to Remedios Varo in the United States in more than 20 years.

Born in Spain, Varo (María de los Remedios Alicia y Rodriga Varo y Uranga) fled Europe in 1941 due to the growing dangers of World War II and emigrated permanently to Mexico City, where she worked amid a community of Mexican and European artists including Leonora Carrington, Gunter Gerzso, Kati and Jose Horna, Alice Rahon, and Wolfgang Paalen, who drew inspiration from the culture and geography of Mexico. It was here that Varo developed her unique practice of juxtaposing Surrealist chance-based techniques with imagery from disciplines as wide-ranging as astronomy, ecology, geographic exploration, feminist critique, magic, mysticism, psychology, and tarot. The works assembled for this exhibition come from 10 institutional and private collections in Europe and the Americas and build upon the Art Institute’s longstanding tradition of collecting, exhibiting, and producing new research on Surrealist artworks.

“Remedios Varo was a uniquely powerful artist, who brilliantly wove together two seemingly contradictory impulses of 20th-century painting,” said Caitlin Haskell, the Art Institute’s Gary C. and Frances Comer Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. “On one hand, Varo’s works are rich with passages of material abstraction, and on the other hand she used storytelling to remarkable ends, showing how the creative imagination could have social and political reach. This exhibition provides an opportunity not only to share Varo’s works with new audiences, but also to underscore her vital place in our conception of mid-20th-century art making.”

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