Column | Still lifes are always about death – but not with Gabriele Münter, there they are alive and kicking

Still lifes have little to do with life. No matter how beautiful it is, everything on a still life is shrinking into dust within the foreseeable future. That red apple? It is dead, just like the orange, the raspberries. There is sometimes an elongated hare to die. A swan is lying with a broken neck or a fishing eye from a silver head. That can milk? He sends where you assist. It will stink, because unlike cow or goat, the milk no longer lives. Those beautiful flowers? Deaths. Sometimes a butterfly has landed or a fly or another corpse.

We love still lifes. Let me speak for myself, I love still lifes. Because of their stillness that the appearance of life is still there, to conceal the harsh facts: everything and everyone dies. But first there is beauty, and that leads to painters to indulge. The most exuberant are the floral still lifes, with colors and swamping and the suggestion of sweet scents. But you don’t have to. Allersoberst is ‘Tulips’ (1967), the video of the Wimmen van der Linden and T. Schippers: one petal falls from a bunch of red tulips after 43 seconds. POEF – The tulips have been launched for eternity. More is not necessary, that is the essence of the still life. Beauty decays, death wins. It is rubbed us with that one sad leaf.

Still life is the term, but forget that life. The silence before death is meant. Nothing to do about it.

O no?

I am in Paris, and go to the Musée d’Art modern for Gabriele Münter. The German Münter was a great painter, and she often painted still lifes, it is bursting here. Although, ‘quiet’. With her, death is not in sight in any fields or roads. In Münters Stillevens the emphasis is on ‘Life’.

Zoom in

Take her magnificent Still life in the tram (1912), a moment when she picked up during a ride and then painted, as if she noted something she knew she would forget as soon as she had thought, I had to remember this. It is a stacked composition of a handbag, three packages and a geranium in top. The still life wiggles on a very living female battle and stays in place thanks to a glove pair of hands. This still life is alive and kicking.

All the still lifes of Gabriele Münter are alive and kicking. On Pensor (1917) A woman ignores a bowl of apples. On Still life with Figure #1 (1910) A woman displaces the still life. On the Still life with the mirror (1913) A mirror dismisses the whole concept of still life. After all, in a mirror everything always goes on, hence the tradition to cover the mirrors in a death house.

Still lifes admonish us: to die. Gabriele Münter painted her answer. She encourages us: Live! Think about it!

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