On Still Life


"Pictorial form is the possibility that things are related to one another in the same way as the elements of the picture
That is how a picture is attached to reality; it reaches right out to it,
It is laid against reality like a measure
Only the end-points of the graduating lines actually touch the object that is to be measured
So a picture also includes the pictorial relationship, which makes it into a picture
The pictorial relationship consists of the correlations of the picture's elements with things
These correlations are, as it were, the feelers of the picture's elements with which the picture touches reality
If a fact is to be a picture, it must have something in common with what it depicts
There must be something identical in a picture and what it depicts, to enable the one to be a picture of the other at all."


Ludwig Wittgenstein


The word still-life was first coined around the middle of the seventeenth century in the Netherlands. It grew from common terms used by Dutch painters: leven, "alive", for drawings made from the model. For example, a vrouwenleven was a female model who would naturally, on occasion, need to move; a stillleven, food, objects etc. conversely remained “still”...


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