When Life Stands Still: on Art and Language

It struck me one day.

In French, we call a still life a nature morte, which translates literally 'dead nature'. To me, the words that I have spoken since childhood carry this brutal finality, the uncomfortable idea of decay and extinction. In English, still life sounds gentler and suspended. Same paintings, two very different sensations.

Sarah Miriam Peale, Still Life with Watermelon, 1822, oil on panel, 46.4 x 67 cm. Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA.

Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese also see death laid upon these kitchen tables, just like Greek and Russian (the latter borrowing from the French). In contrast, Dutch and German (stilleven and Stillleben) interpret these scenes as 'quiet life', establishing a close connection with English through language and culture. As for Asian languages and Arabic, their idioms also emphasise stillness as an absence of movement or noise.

So, what does this change, really?

Words have an impact. They carry our cultures, our beliefs, our emotions. To think of a nature morte is to summon the idea of an ending, and to reflect on the passage of time from a definitive point of view. To think of a still life is to pause, to observe a movement in suspension, to meditate on a journey. While the nature morte focusses on death as a result, the state of not being alive, the still life considers the process of dying, the becoming dead in a way. Both conceptions lead to the ideas of transience and inevitability, but the shift in perspectives is, in my view, crucial.

Before I learned to see paintings, I was rather indifferent to the genre of the still life. I found such artworks dull and sad, associated with absence and void. Despite the fact that between then and now I got older and more inclined to think about life and death in different terms, I continue to think that, as long as French was my only linguistic reference, I couldn’t see beyond the words. As guided by language, I was looking at dead nature, in other words, life extinguished. When I trained in speaking about these in English, I approached them like I approach a photograph: I started to see time paused, still life.

This reflection taught me something about perception quite broadly applicable, to art as well as life in general. The words we use to speak about art are not neutral frames, they are part of the story we tell. They shape the way we look and feel. The way we think. To cultivate curiosity in art is not simply to look closely. It is also to listen to the language that is used, and to realise how it fashions our gaze. To remain open, receptive, and critical is therefore a necessary discipline. Because in the end, our appreciation of art - like our appreciation of people and cultures - can change with the words we choose to name them.

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A selection of artworks from Rijksmuseum curated by Echoes of the Canvas is available. Click here and discover the many ways artists have interpreted the still life.