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So what makes this exhibit more than a live version of a Buzzfeed list of 50 Tasty Paintings You Have to See? The theory is that how we depict food is a reflection of who we are—or, more likely, who we want others to think we are. Food, like other appetites, always has a moral dimension, and the exhibit can be read for what it says about the people who created these works . . . at least for a while.
The next several galleries cover the 19th century, and here the theme of food painting as a window into attitudes makes sense, as when Raphaelle Peale (son of Charles Willson Peale) paints fruit and vegetable still lives that have the virtue and probity of New England bankers. But meat and drink soon find their way into the images, crystal wine decanters and voluptuous red flesh hinting at other pleasures. As painted by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, the bounty of a hunt—species piled on species, corpse upon corpse—looks like the results of a fit of God’s wrath on the animal kingdom.
- Michael Gebert
As a result, the last gallery offers a very few works separated by a great deal of space, which hardly meshes with the ubiquity of food imagery in our lives. (And it doesn’t help when they’re as familiar as Wayne Thiebaud’s painting of cakes and pies, a great modern work, but about as overexposed as the Mona Lisa by now.) There are a very few examples of commercial art—a Chez Panisse menu that, oddly, doesn’t appear to be by David Lance Goines, who did so much for that seminal restaurant—but there should have been lots more, Googie menu covers and surreally colorful advertisements and so on, establishing the noisy context for the pop-art works here. And showing us why we still need painters, when any of us can make food art with a pocket camera or iPhone anytime we go out to eat.
