SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA.- The San Jose Museum of Art presents “The Not-So-Still Life: A Century of California Painting and Sculpture,” on view through Sunday, February 15, 2004. Lead sponsorship of The Not-So-Still Life is provided by Deborah  and Andy Rappaport. Sponsorship is provided by the Myra Reinhard Family Foundation; Wells Fargo; Adaptec; and the Kent and Rita Norton Foundation. Generous in-kind support of the opening night celebration provided by Il Fornaio, Karen Baba of Plan Decor, Grey Goose Vodka, Corazón Tequila, Elliston Vineyards.  

Jointly curated by Dr. William Gerdts (Professor Emeritus of City University of New York), Dr. Patricia Trenton (founder of the American Art Department of the Denver Art Museum) and Dr. Susan Landauer, Katie and Drew Gibson Chief Curator at SJMA, this exhibition traces the intriguing evolution of still life in California from the turn of the century until about 2000. Like other genres such as landscape and portraiture, still life has undergone a radical transformation. Today’s still life is no longer still; it has not only moved off the table, but off the wall and into three dimensions. This exhibition will investigate the great variety of media the theme now engages, from the assemblage tableaux of George Herms to the oversized stacked plates of Robert Therrien.  

Until recently, still life assumed a lowly position in the hierarchy of art. It has been the least theorized of all the branches of the arts, and thought of as unworthy of serious discussion. In the last several decades, however, a proliferation of critical studies and exhibitions devoted to still-life painting have changed that perception. Professor William Gerdts’ American Still Life Painting, published by Praeger in 1971, made the first major break-through in the critical study of American still life painting. The ensuing interest in still life has precipitated a number of revisionist art-historical critiques of the genre, most notably, Norman Bryson’s Looking at the Overlooked (Harvard University Press, 1990), which has found a gendered bias against still life in the early part of this century - a bias that has all but disappeared in recent decades. This exhibition traces the development of the genre from the "low-plane" domestic reality with which it has historically been viewed to its emergence into the "higher" levels of critical discourse.  

The early period (1900-1930) concentrates on the Impressionist painters of California, who are celebrated almost entirely for their landscape paintings. While it is true that most Impressionists devoted their talent primarily to landscape, many of them, including Guy Rose, Edgar Payne, Maurice Braun, Joseph Kleitsch, Paul Lauritz, and Clarence Hinkle, painted strikingly beautiful still lifes as well-works that have rarely been shown. Some artists, such as Joseph Raphael, George Brandriff, Armin Hanson, and Donna Schuster, created several unusual still lifes of an autobiographical nature. While the first part of the exhibition concentrates on the California Impressionists, it also includes examples by artists working outside the plein-air tradition, such as Paul de Longpre in Los Angeles, as well as the floral paintings of Edith White, associated with the Point Loma Theosophist movement in San Diego.

After 1930, the show expands into the early modern era of the genre. Because still life was generally not invested with ideal meanings associated with history painting or portraiture, it became an attractive vehicle for modernists with formal concerns. For example, this section includes the abstract still lifes of Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Henrietta Shore. There are also paintings by Surrealist artists like Helen Lundeberg and Dorr Bothwell, who produced a number of intriguing self-referential works.  

In the decades since World War II, there has been a tremendous resurgence of the still life. The contemporary genre holds no strict boundaries, but crosses over into other categories. In the 1980s and ’90s, still life artists have also reclaimed the symbolic, allegorical, narrative content shunned by many of their modernist predecessors. The exhibition charts this intriguing revival, which is far from a conventional rehash, but a recoding of the still life in thoroughly modern terms.  

Guest Curators: Dr. William H. Gerdts is Professor Emeritus of Art History at the Graduate School of City University of New York and an internationally renowned scholar of American art. He has published over 50 books and catalogues, including early landmark studies of American Impressionism and American still-life painting. Recent publications include the groundbreaking trilogy, Art Across America (Abbeville, 1996) and California Impressionism (Abbeville, 1998).  

Dr. Patricia Trenton, currently Art Director of the Los Angeles Athletic Club Collection, LAACO Ltd., was founding curator of the American Art Department of the Denver Art Museum in the early 1970s. Since then, she has become a leading authority on the art of the West, with numerous award-winning publications, including California Light: 1900-1930 (with Gerdts, Laguna Art Museum, 1990) and Independent Spirits: Women Painters of the American West, 1890-1945 (University of California Press,1996), now in its 3rd printing.