ABSTRACT
Critics have recently proclaimed that the genre of still life is at the “cutting edge of modernism:” indeed, that it is a “paradigm of modernism” (Stevenson 83). Such declarations would seem to announce the redemption of a genre that has been much maligned in the last several centuries. However, scrutiny of the critical reception of modernist still life reveals that prejudices persist, that critics still subscribe, consciously or unconsciously, to the designation of still life as the lowliest of genres, at the absolute bottom of a hierarchy first established by the French Academy in the seventeenth century. How can still life as a genre be considered at the “cutting edge of modernism” while at the same time continuing to be, in the words of Norman Bryson, “the least theorised of the genres, … still marginalised in today's professional art history” (8, 10)? An examination of this overlooked genre in the post—World War I art of the American avant-garde sheds some light on this paradoxical situation. As well, the emergence of still life as a major vehicle of expression in machine-age America raises inevitable and intriguing issues regarding gender.1
