Catalogue introduction to Golden Age,
published by York Art Gallery to accompany the exhibion
Making a Masterpiece; Bouts and Beyond, 1450 - 2020
When the possibility arose of including Christopher Cook’s work in Making a Masterpiece: Bouts and Beyond, 1450-2020 I immediately could envisage how his images would enhance the exhibition’s themes. Taking its inspiration from the fifteenth-century painting St Luke Drawing the Virgin and Child by the workshop of Dieric Bouts, the exhibition explores the creation of artistic imagery, especially the processes that intervene between whatever source material artists look at in the world and the final artworks that emerge at the end. Even the most ‘naturalistic’-looking images are never straightforward transcriptions from reality; artists transform what they see around them, in combination with other concepts, so that their artworks will be visually powerful and effectively communicate certain ideas.
The exhibition’s different sections explore this idea through artworks of various kinds: early Netherlandish paintings, drawings and prints; depictions of artists working in the studio; and the genres of ‘Golden Age’ Dutch and Flemish paintings—landscape, portraiture, interior genre scenes, and still life. In some cases, the transformation between real world models and painted image is visually obvious, for instance in Etty’s mythological subjects, or some of the more abstract religious icons painted by Bouts and his followers. In other cases—including most of the Golden Age artworks—paintings are designed to look like casual snapshots of real-life scenes, even though they have actually been carefully constructed from disparate pieces of imagery. Cook’s current work fits perfectly into the exhibition, since it embodies a highly distinctive transformation from source material to artistic image: he looks at the meticulously painted, brightly coloured still life paintings from the past and turns them into experimental black-and-white analogues, infused with signs of contemporary malaise.
In so doing, Cook’s work emphasises qualities that are already present (but usually more sublimated) in the original works. Even as classic still life celebrates the accumulation of material goods enabled by international trade and the growth of capital, it hints at the darker sides of this drive, most often with signs of transience: everything we temporarily possess in this life will decay and disappear, as will we ourselves. Some still life images, those in the vanitas (vanity) or memento mori (‘remember death’) tradition, highlight such meanings through well-known symbols like skulls, hourglasses or recently extinguished candles. Others hint at transience more subtly through their focus on substances that cannot endure: flowers in full bloom, just-peeled fruit, freshly carved meat and fish, short-lived insects. Occasionally a living animal intrudes mischievously on the scene, or the goods are so precariously piled that a toppling seems immanent. Such works leave viewers to decide how far to admire the rendered objects, or meditate on the inevitability of their disappearance. What Cook’s images do is focus more squarely on the moral problems involved in the drive to accumulate and then protect wealth, problems that many people today see as intertwined with the structures of capitalism. The urge to exclude or destroy any perceived threat to prosperity leads to deep social conflict, even military intervention.
The presence of ten of Cook’s graphite paintings at York Art Gallery have allowed direct comparison between his striking black-and-white images and the colourful paintings of traditional Dutch and Flemish still life. Initially, five of Cook’s works made between 2017 and 2019, inspired by paintings scattered across various European collections, were hung alongside other examples of Golden Age still life from York Art Gallery’s collection. While these five were on the walls, Cook back in his studio created five new works that respond directly to paintings at York Art Gallery, and the new works have been switched into the installation for the final weeks of the exhibition. These images respond in various creative ways to Frans Snyders’s A Game Stall, c. 1625-30; Abraham Hendricksz van Beyeren’s Banquet Still Life, c. 1650-1655; Alexander Adriaenssen’s Still Life with Fish and Cat, 1631; Juriaan van Streek’s Vanitas, c. 1665-75; and Jan van Os’s Still Life of Fruit and Flowers with Bird’s Nest on a Marble Ledge, c. 1772-80.
The immediate visual contrasts seen through the hang have brought out in full force three complementary ways that Cook’s images transform traditional imagery: through their subject matter, their black-and-white aesthetic, and their experimental materiality. With each of these aspects, the comparison has heightened insights into the older works as much as the new ones.
Almost all of Cook’s paintings shown in the exhibition include still life’s most prevalent subject matter of luscious fruit and/or flowers, usually presented in expensive porcelain, silver or glass vessels. It is clear that for Cook these substances best convey the preciousness and human ingenuity at the heart of seventeenth-century Dutch (and modern) capitalism: they require sophisticated craft skills for their manufacture, and/or well-developed cultivation techniques and transportation networks to bring them together on a European domestic table (although many Dutch works play on the viability of such compilations, for instance in flower paintings of diverse specimens that could not in reality bloom at the same time). Another sub-genre of still life, represented in York’s collection by Snyders’s A Game Stall and Adriaenssen’s study of dead fish and birds, presents humanity’s power to control and consume other animals, ideas that Cook develops in Top Predator and Turvy. Sometimes a living animal intrudes into such scenes to disrupt the hierarchy or visualize our animal-like urge to consume, like the cats in Snyders and Adriaenssen (the latter appearing in a slightly more sinister incarnation in Cook’s Top Predator) and the monkeys helping themselves to the fruit in Cook’s Global Reach and Forbidden Fruit.
Many traditional still lifes use striking juxtapositions to set objects in visual and thematic dialogue with one another, but they do so within well-established parameters. Adrianssen juxtaposes the products of sea and air, Van Beyeren piles up exotic tableware and foodstuffs in a precarious composition, and Van Streek invites viewers to wonder how a globe, a helmet, a violin and images of dead political leaders might be connected. All such objects relate to human social life, and they are depicted in an internally consistent scale, usually fairly close to life-size, in paintings whose absolute size varies considerably (for instance the Snyders is a massive work at 254 centimetres in width, while the Adriaenssen is only 65 centimetres wide). Cook’s paintings are all in a consistent size of 72 by 102 centimetres, but he creates more radical internal juxtapositions by interposing signs of violence and military power in the midst of the wealth, and he often does so in varying scales to accentuate the jarring contrasts. Hence the distant pylons in Forbidden Fruit and Top Predator; the miniature planes, helicopters and drones in Copter Cage, Reaper Returns, Still Life with Dragonfly and Global Reach; the small snipers defending the tall cup in Panopticon; the burning building and explosions in the backgrounds of Memento Mori, Top Predator and Reaper Returns; and, this time on a more comparable scale, the barbed wire impinging on the bowl of flowers in Figure 8 Wire. Cook also sometimes inserts postcard images seemingly hanging on a back wall or lying on a foreground ledge to provide visual or thematic commentary, like the Madonna del Parto (pregnant Madonna) image in Forbidden Fruit, the distant mountain in Panopticon and the Eurofighter in Top Predator.
Another striking point of comparison between traditional still life and Cook’s works—this time a more emphatic contrast—lies in their use of colour. Classic still life uses varied pigments suspended in oil to render the distinctive colour variations and textures of the attractive depicted materials. Cook’s unique graphite technique (powdered graphite dissolved in a mixture of oil and resin) eliminates differences of colour, so that his depicted materials can only be distinguished by form and, to some extent, texture. This choice has a number of consequences. One is to emphasise, in a literal way, the metaphorical darkness of the greed and violence that so often accompanies the extraction of wealth. The luscious substances retain a kind of shiny attraction, but their reduction to greyscale encourages viewers to beware the dangers of falling prey to their seduction. Another effect of Cook’s black-and-white aesthetic is to heighten the impact of absolute composition: the arrangement of light and dark across the surface becomes paramount, whereas with the older paintings it can sometimes be easy to mentally wander into their imaginary worlds and overlook the care with which they have been formally composed.
The role of the ground, or the setting, is another crucial feature of Cook’s black-and-white aesthetic. Most Golden Age still life paintings—like those by Adriaenssen, Van Beyeren and Van Streek—use a dark, indistinct background to highlight by contrast the specificity of the foreground objects. Snyders offers a vague architectural setting for his dead game, and Van Os creates a hazy garden behind his fruit and flowers, but still there remains an obvious contrast with the bright, clear forms of the main subject matter. Cook’s images, however, create a more profound obscurity of ground/setting. While the foreground objects do typically emerge most forcefully, it is usually difficult to judge exactly where they might be located and how space extends behind or around them. In Reaper Returns we seem to be looking into a clear dark nothingness stretching to the distant smoke clouds, but the transition into distance is harder to decipher in works like Top Predator, and the setting is particularly obscured in images like Copter Cage, Forbidden Fruit and Still Life with Dragonfly. The works often enhance this deliberate obscurity with vertical and horizontal streaks which, rather than representing any particular substance or form, enliven the space with a sense of vibration. Sometimes they set off the depicted objects, but at times they threaten to meld into them, leaving one wondering where exactly each form begins and ends. The juxtaposition of objects against the partly-indecipherable grounds can be eerie, like the tall cup in Panopticon shimmering against its surrounding darkness, or the silver and glass vessels in Reaper Returns and Turvy half-dissolving into the ground.
These visual effects closely connect to the experimental nature of Cook’s works. He works on these images while they are laid horizontally, first applying broad strokes of liquid graphite across the bright white heavy paper. He renders the forms by pushing graphite strokes away to expose parts of the ground, as much as by adding or shaping the graphite. In other words, where the Golden Age paintings carefully build up oil paint across the surface of the canvas—usually in a meticulous, relatively slow technique—Cook subtracts as much as he adds, and he repeatedly changes his mind as he works, pouring white spirit over a well-developed composition and wiping across much or all of it to start again. Where oil paint is comparatively thick and viscous, Cook’s graphite is highly liquid and mobile, so that he can work quickly and instinctively. Some parts of an image are worked up in greater detail, while other elements are sketched more roughly, though when viewed up close, even the most seemingly detailed elements (like the flower petals in Memento Mori) are soon revealed as well-judged brush or finger strokes. Once Cook is finally satisfied with the composition, the materials dry quickly, leaving the most recently-worked elements sharply defined, while earlier forms might remain half-washed out (for instance the cloudy mid-ground fruit in Still Life with Dragonfly). Seen in person, the dried graphite subtly sparkles in the light, drawing attention to the works’ unusual materiality.
Cook’s self-invented technique profoundly shapes the effects and meanings of his works, in contrast with the earlier paintings. In many Dutch and Flemish still lifes, individual brushstrokes become apparent if you move close enough to the picture surface, but you don’t have to step back very far before they meld into a seductive illusion of reality. Materially as well as thematically, these oil paintings carefully build up a persuasive world of abundant objects, just at the edge of tangible reach. Their makers assert proud authorship through signatures, and viewers are invited to admire their pictorial analogue to the worldly wealth collected in the Netherlands. Cook’s works, in contrast, overtly undermine this illusionary world. He invites us to question whether indeed we are living in another Golden Age, and if so, whose. He experiments and improvises, creates and dissolves, pushes disparate ideas together and pulls them apart again. His pictures are clearly the product of a distinctive artistic imagination, but he does not lay claim to them with signatures: the only legible word within the ten works is Memento Mori’s ‘Mori’—death—occupying the place of Van Os’s signature in the lower right corner.
The changeover from the first five paintings to the second set of five was a particularly intriguing moment in the exhibition. The first group, originally made in dialogue with disparate sources and hung alongside York’s still life paintings, invited categorical comparison of subjects, materials, techniques, attitudes: we could see what Cook aims to achieve, vs. the ambitions of the Dutch and Flemish works. Few viewers could be expected to recognise any of the specific quotations in Cook’s images, though that hardly matters, since the works are designed to stand on their own. The second set of five created a very different opportunity. They too will stand on their own, and no doubt Cook would not want viewers to obsess too closely over comparing their details with those of the York Art Gallery paintings, but the brief opportunity to do so only enhances their interest, given the insights they offer into his varying decisions about how to use (and transform) his chosen source material.
Memento Mori and Panopticon reflect the overall composition of their source images most closely (Van Os and Van Beyeren respectively); they are far from exact copies but preserve most of the central material with various pictorial modifications and subtle additions: in Memento Mori, the substitution of a Death’s-Head Hawkmoth for the butterfly at the lower edge, and the replacement of the background garden with the burning building; in Panopticon, the addition of the mountain image, the replacement of the background column and niche with what appears to be a picture frame surrounding mysterious ghostly forms, and the armed men taking position at the summit of the cup. Seeing these works adjacent to their source paintings is like re-seeing the originals through a transforming lens, or a semi-transparent overlay.
Top Predator goes a step further in retaining much of Adriaenssen’s composition but replacing the basket of songbirds with the helmet and feathers from Van Streek’s Vanitas, inserting at front left the Eurofighter picture (which reaches towards our space like the fish on the platter) and adding the pylons and explosions in the distant background. The most radical interventions appear in the other two works. In Turvy’s startling composition, fruit and tableware from Van Beyeren have been pulled apart to make way for Snyders’s dead swan, thus inviting the two sub-genres into an uncomfortable visual conversation. Global Reach retains only the trumpet and globe from Van Streek, flanked by a hanging curtain (as seen in some other Dutch paintings) and a monkey helping itself to a scattered collection of fruit. Cook’s globe is imprinted and shadowed by by tiny Eurofighter planes, who presumably have taken off from the airbase in the background to begin their (defensive or offensive?) patrol. The monkey, cousin to the one in Forbidden Fruit, looks over its shoulder at this alarming activity. As each of the five images interprets their sources in such varying ways, they underscore how the creative process is never identical from one work to the next: Cook waits to see where each image will take him, experimenting to find the most vibrant combination of visual and thematic ideas.
Jeanne Nuechterlein 2019