Enfilade

From the University of California Press:

Carol Armstrong, The Matter of Still Life Between Chardin and Morandi (Oakland: University of California Press, 2026), 150 pages, ISBN: 978-0520416994, £42 / $50.

How does still life ‘matter’? The two essays in this book, based on Carol Armstrong’s lectures as part of the 2020 Franklin D. Murphy Lectureship at the University of Kansas, explore the concept of ‘material thought’ as it relates to still life. Armstrong looks at two major figures of European still-life painting: eighteenth-century French artist Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin and twentieth-century Italian painter Giorgio Morandi. She discusses their paintings alongside the works of other European painters, philosophers, and critics. These close readings consider the question of how we understand materiality in relation to still-life painting and the material objects this genre represents.

Carol Armstrong is Professor of History of Art at Yale University, where she teaches nineteenth-century European art. Her most recent books are Cézanne’s Gravity and Painting Photography Painting.

c o n t e n t s

Preface
1  Chardin, Diderot, and the Muteness of Made Things: Between Ekphrasis and the Encyclopedia
2  Giorgio Morandi and the Matter of Still Life

Notes
Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Index