Still life presents a paradox. The polarities of ‘stillness’ and ‘motion’ are thrust into uneasy contact as the ‘still’ – eternal yet frozen – art object confronts the rhythms and vitality of ephemeral ‘life’. Strictly, the term refers to a genre of painting that depicts inanimate objects, yet the implications of ‘still life’ in the modern world are more complex and enigmatic. Its very designation conjures word play and duality, gesturing toward what the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) described as ‘the double life of a still life’. It is this unsettling and mysterious ‘doubleness’ from which this study takes inspiration.

Still life exists at the borders of private and public space, nature and culture, vitality and mortality. It is, as Bonnie Costello observes, ‘a threshold genre’. These dualities and counter-pressures invest still life with fruitful intensity, and sustain its interest for artists despite a critical tradition that regards it as a minor genre. In what follows, I do not intend to present a history of still life or a genre study, but to recover and extend the scope of its meaning across a broad transcultural and disciplinary range. By examining the shifting terms and characteristics ascribed to the genre in painting, I suggest that we can open up a more nuanced discussion of the ‘still life’ and its significance for modern cultural practices across different media, in literature, painting, sculpture and dance. Further, we can uncover the potential for movement and transformation in the idea of stillness and the ordinary.

Firstly, it will help to briefly trace the rather convoluted etymology of still life as it evolved across European language and culture.