This chapter discusses food within the discipline of art history. Methodologies of close looking are covered. Theories of iconography, symbolism, and design are discussed in relation to food. Art is considered as a data set useful in the interrogation of food-related social history. The question of whether the display of and debates about images of food can be a factor that causes social change is presented. Practical suggestions are included for undertaking image-related research, finding secondary literature, and securing funding. Ultimately, the chapter presents strategies for treating food and art symbiotically, rather than as two separate bodies of knowledge.
Scholarship about the intersection of food and art can be undertaken by art historians, who see their mission as qualitatively interpreting and historicizing visual material. Indeed, scholars in this discipline sometimes study images of food, tools for preparing and serving food, and food products themselves. The discipline of art history took its modern form during the nineteenth century, when scholars began to classify the paintings and sculptures produced in Western Europe in rigorous ways, focusing on variables such as style, media, subject matter, and craftsmanship. The discipline celebrated “masterpieces”—the most skilfully produced art of each era. Although art-historical scholarship during the early twenty-first century embraces non-Western art, as well as some vernacular creativity, the discipline remains driven by the so-called “major” arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture produced in Europe and the Americas. Indeed, art historians most frequently scrutinize skilfully made objects that are visually complex, produced to bolster the agendas of powerful people and institutions or as items of luxury for elite members of society. Folk art, commercial art, and non-art imagery can also be interrogated by art historians, but scholarship in these areas rarely draws widespread attention within the discipline.
The discipline of art history has long embraced insights from other academic disciplines when interpreting imagery, and incorporating insights from food studies in no way undermines standard modes of inquiry about art. That said, art historians almost always forefront a specific work of art, the oeuvre of an artist, the art patronage of a specific person, or the history of an art movement in their scholarship rather than forefronting a type of food, food preparation technique, or idea about cuisine. A scholar interested in thinking art-historically about food would thus be well advised to begin with a well-known work of art or artist, and then contextualize it with ideas from across the field of food studies. During the course of analysis, insights from philosophers, psychologists, historians, critics, and theorists can also be brought into play. Like scholars from across the humanities, art historians often contextualize cultural phenomena by engaging with bodies of theoretical inquiry that expose power relationships. Some of these include Marxism, feminism, post-colonialism, queer theory, eco-criticism, theories of nationhood, theories of ability, and critical race theory.
Food itself has traditionally fallen outside the realm of scrutiny by art professionals, but images of food are often analyzed carefully. That said, the best treatments of food by art historians working today start with the premise that the stories of art and food can be intertwined. Such scholarship shows that there was sometimes a symbiotic relationship between art and food making, and that considering the history of food concurrent with the history of art produces insights that would be impossible in treatments that studied art or food alone.
One of the most sustained and rigorous treatments of art and food together is the book by the art historian John Varriano, titled Tastes and Temptations. His work is an analytical and scholarly treatment of Renaissance Italy, in which he makes professional parallels between artists and cooks. He discusses ways to analyze images of food, from the symbolic to the sacred to the sensual. He considers ties between food making and art making on a literal level, including why eggs, butter, lard, and oils are used in both endeavors. He considers how people used both art and food to help them think, and he even considers art made from food products, such as sugar sculpture. The art historian Jocelyn Hackforth-Jones’s book Dining with the Impressionists presents a similarly intriguing intertwined story of food and art history. Although her book lacks a full scholarly apparatus of footnotes, she presents a fascinating argument. She notes that the rise of impressionism was concurrent with the rise of modern cooking techniques in France, as bolstered by the revolutionary chef and writer Auguste Escoffier, and that impressionism can be understood as an obsessive celebration of new and modern foods. Within modernity, Cecilia Novera’s book Antidiets of the Avant-Garde focuses on twentieth-century artists who radically questioned the roles of food in our lives. Although it is common for art historians to mention an anecdote about an artist’s relationship to food in passing, it is rare for the subject to be given a full-blown analytical treatment. Alexandra Leaf and Fred Leeman’s book Van Gogh’s Table at the Auberge Ravoux is a rare example of scholarship on an artist that places more emphasis on how food fit into a painter’s life rather than how art fit into it.
A theoretical approach that many art historians use when looking at food-related imagery is iconography. In the strictest sense of the word, iconography refers to the relationship of imagery (“icono”) to written texts (“graphy”). An iconographic analysis of a biblical painting that shows people eating might compare the types of food and people in the image to scriptural accounts of the Last Supper, the Feast in the House of Levi, and the Wedding at Cana. A scholar would argue that the image fits one of these narratives better than others by articulating parallels between the image and text. The best iconographic analyses press the analysis further, into the realm of “iconology”—arguing that a more complete understanding of the image can be achieved by analyzing the norms and values of the era in which the painting was created. The most profound iconographic scholarship starts from the assumption that art is not simply an illustration of written sources, nor does it provide an objective window onto the past. Art, rather, presents ideas that may not be apparent by looking at the original textual story. To undertake an iconological analysis with an emphasis on food, a scholar might discuss how an artist has made strategic choices about which foods are depicted, how they are being served, if they are shown partially eaten, and whether they have symbolic meanings. In the case of Leonardo da Vinci’s celebrated Last Supper from 1495–98 CE, for example, a scholar might note that it is well known that the mural was created for a refectory (dining hall) in a monastery, and it is commonly assumed that the monks were meant to empathize with the disciples as they consumed their meals. A food-related iconological analysis might strive to understand whether it is important that the rolls of bread on the table are shown uneaten, that empty plates and bowls are shown carefully placed in front of disciples, that wine glasses are all shown half full, that some fruits and vegetables are shown scattered on the tablecloth, and that two platters appear to contain the main course. The scholar would ultimately argue that the artist used the biblical text as a starting point, but that the painting also represents a new understanding of food geared toward the patron and viewer.
Perhaps the most directly food-related scholarship on art focuses on sculpture, painting, and mosaics that uses food as a medium. Using food to make art has been common, both in recent history and in the deep past. That said, because of the ephemerality of art that is often created to be consumed, it becomes increasingly more challenging to scrutinize this type of art farther back in time. Textual sources and prints, nonetheless, confirm that artists as far back as the Middle Ages in Europe made high quality sculptures from foodstuff. Indeed, the anthropologist Sidney Mintz explained in his groundbreaking book Sweetness and Power that sculptures, and sometimes even architecture, could be created from a marzipan-like paste of sugar mixed with ground nuts. Molds that were used to make visually spectacular desserts seem to have been strikingly similar to those used to make bronze sculpture, and the history of food presentation during preand early-modern history can thus be linked together. Analyses of food as a creative media are not linked to desserts either. Decorative molds for casting butter were common during the nineteenth century, and at its height this craft merged with the fine-art establishment. As the art historian Pamela Simpson has explained in her book Corn Palaces and Butter Queens, artists carved, cast, and exhibited sculptures made from butter across America, as well as made mosaics from grain and other grasses. Although art made from food may seem unusual, when the focus of the imagery was also food related it was in fact a form of experimental design.
Another theoretical approach common in art history is to scrutinize the relationship of form to function in food-related decorative arts, such as dishware and cutlery. Such an approach is usually described as the analysis of artistic design. Good design is when form is merged with function in a simple but thoughtful way. Form includes the actual shapes of objects, as well as decorations on them. Ancient Greek wine cups are often good examples of design, as they commonly contain painted scenes of drunken revelry or the god Dionysus. Extending the analysis to the actual shape of the cups, François Lissarrague demonstrated in his excellent book The Aesthetics of the Greek Banquet that ancient artists manipulated the shape of cups and serving vessels to control temperature, to prevent accidental sloshing, and to appear to hold less than they did in reality.
Art historians are storytellers, who present research in analytical and narrative form, situating imagery in the context of a specific moment or era of a specific place. Original research consists of presenting previously unknown information about works of art, or interpreting well-known work in a new way. Art historians most frequently write about the intents and social perspectives of artists, but can also write from the perspectives of critics, other art historians, collectors, institutions, politicians, the general public, or anyone else who has been interested in art at a specific time and place.
The core data used by scholars of art are visual, and the basic methodology employed by all art historians is careful visual scrutiny of art objects. When this methodology is applied to a single work of art in a sustained way it is called “close looking,” and the goal is usually to understand how an artist used the formal properties of art—such as color, line, composition, light, and texture—to make a visual statement. In the case of a still life painting showing fruit, we might start by asking whether the food is shown in saturated or muted colors, whether literal or implied lines direct our attention to some fruits more than others, if the foods are juxtaposed with each other in a thoughtful way, if some pieces of fruit are better illuminated than others, and if the food is rendered with clarity or with loose brushwork. Combined with a discussion of the subject matter, such as what types of fruit are present and whether they appear ripe, we would come to a conclusion about the meaning of this specific work of art, and how it speaks for itself. In the case of still lifes depicting luscious fruit such meaning is commonly assumed to be a celebration of exotics or a metaphor for sexual pleasure. Extending this methodology of close looking across many works of art, while seeking out visual patterns, is a strategy used to identify motifs and themes, which can together compose “visual cultures.” Such an approach is often useful for embedding art into social history.
Pinpointing specific examples of art that changed how people understood their food, cooking, and eating is the type of questioning that is at the core of rhetorical and social art history. This is in contrast to scholarship that assumes art played a passive role in social history— reflecting societal norms and values but not steering them in new directions. Scholars pursuing this approach seek out images that were publicly debated, contributing to shifts in food-related policies, practices, and traditions. For example, a scholar could seek out evidence of whether the widespread cultural awareness during the twentieth century of Vincent van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters from 1885—a painting that shows a peasant family so impoverished that they eat nothing but tubers in the winter—inspired conversations that ultimately resulted in the enactment of social welfare programs. Similarly, seeking out artistic representations of foods that were used as surrogates for actual food—due to specific items being out of season or otherwise unavailable— could be a step toward framing art as a central component of the rituals of eating. If foods depicted in paintings, sculptures, prints, or books were commonly used as the inspiration for the creation of real dishes, then an argument could be made that the imagery is just as important as the ingredients. Lastly, if it can be demonstrated that eaters sometimes evaluated the quality or significance of their food, not by contextualizing it amidst actual foodstuffs, but by comparisons to artistic representations of food, photographs of food in advertising, fake foods in store windows, and other visual representations of edible goods, then art could be framed as at the core of decisions that people make about their eating.
Analyses of art often also include discussion of food-related signs and symbols. This approach can be particularly useful when looking at emblems, portraits, and other highly contrived images that were meant to serve rhetorical purposes. Examining how foods create meanings in art, due to their symbolic nature, in ways that would not otherwise be apparent, is at the core of this approach. While some scholarship takes a piecemeal approach to symbols in imagery, proceeding from motif to motif, the best scholarship synthesizes meanings into a coherent whole, exploring how the art uses specific symbols to convey a total message.
Although most art historians do not work with living human subjects, scholars who study contemporary art often gather their data directly from artists, visiting their studios, corresponding with them, and conducting interviews. Some of the most compelling food-related art made in recent years is by artists who engage with foodstuff on a conceptual level and as a media. Rolando Briseño has drawn on the visual traditions of indigenous Mexico by making a sculpture from chocolate of a human heart and sculptures of Aztec deities from corn and wheat. Other well-known examples of contemporary art made from food include assemblages by Joseph Beuys created from margarine, fantastic foodscapes by Carl Warner, and a bust made from chocolate by Janine Anconi. Modern and contemporary artists have also critically engaged with eating utensils and packaging. Meret Oppenheim’s fur-covered tea cup, Andy Warhol’s Coke bottles and soup cans, and Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party installation are some of the better-known examples.
As of 2011, all periods of art history remain understudied using food as a critical framework. Art historians typically define their fields of expertise by culture and time period. One might specialize, for example, in modern American or medieval Spanish art. Successful careers could be formed in any such field of art history by using food as an anchor, modeling inquiry on some of the trailblazing studies discussed above.
Because profound innovation can occur when disparate bodies of knowledge are put into conversation, increased collaboration between art historians and food professionals could be exciting. Some precedents in this spirit already exist. Art curator Yoshio Tsuchiya wrote A Feast for the Eyes, which explores the aesthetic norms of food presentation in Japan. Along with the food arranger Masaru Yamamoto, he interrogated seasonality, normality, functionality, aesthetics, and utensils. The fact that cooking is often viewed as women’s work is a theme that was explored in an exhibition produced by the advocacy organization Girls Incorporated titled Women of Taste. The project paired chefs with textile artists, and the result was a series of innovative fine-art quilts that used food as their subject matter. People have sometimes recreated food that appears in art, or used art as inspiration for developing modern recipes. Claire Clifton, for example, wrote a book titled The Art of Food, which juxtaposes works of art with snippets of culinary history and newly developed recipes. Eat Art—a project sponsored by the National Gallery of Australia—featured the work of 31 chefs who were inspired by paintings in the collection. Foodculture, edited by Barbara Fischer, is also noteworthy as a collection of essays that attempts to bring the study of food and art together in innovative ways. An analysis of buying, preparing, and eating food in art, as well as food symbolism, is in the book by the art historian Kenneth Bendiner titled Food in Painting.
Large-scale and systematic projects geared toward identifying and cataloging works of art that focus on food, and subsequently solidifying a canon of great works of food-related art, is a task that remains to be undertaken. Certainly there have been attempts to gather food-related images together, and these resources are valuable. However, when compared to some of the large-scale, long-term, and in-depth thematic projects that have been undertaken in art history, it is clear that our cataloging of food in art has been modest in scope. As a contrast, note that The Image of the Black in Western Art, for example, is a project housed at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University, and it has been systematically collecting, cataloging, analyzing, and publishing images of black people since the 1960s (www.imageoftheblack.com, accessed on March 29, 2012). Similarly, the Index of Christian Art—an initiative that began at Princeton University in 1917—has amassed and published an immense amount of information about art produced by Christians of the Middle Ages (ica.princeton.edu, accessed on March 29, 2012). A parallel food-related project could potentially be undertaken by a research institute or university.
Using theoretical frameworks that are common in food studies, either in a literal or metaphorical way, has the potential to push art historical scholarship forward. Major concepts from across the field of food studies, such as food systems, could by applied to imagery. For example, the celebrated Warka Vase, carved in about 3000 BCE, seems to depict an ancient food system in Mesopotamia—from field to consumer. On the bottom of the vase beasts of burden are shown above a grain field; in the middle register baskets of foodstuff are being brought to a central location; and on the top register food is being redistributed with the oversight of temple officials. We might ask if the questions that scholars have posed about modern food systems can inform a reinterpretation of such historical imagery. Many other concepts from food studies have the potential to enrich the art-historical discourse. Scholars might ask, for example, if art making is similar to or different from following a recipe, whether artistic traditions are comparable to cuisines, and whether the highly developed taste of art and food connoisseurs are comparable.
Scrutinizing food itself as visual art, in a tight way, using art-historical theories and methodologies, is another area for further research. Since the mid-twentieth century art historians have increasingly broadened our definition of art, in light of the realization that art-historical questions, methods, and theories can be applied to many forms of creative expression besides masterpieces of painting and sculpture. Today it is common, indeed, to see art historians publish studies of “visual cultures” that include photography, diagrams, illustrations, cinema, and advertisements. It is also common for art historians to scrutinize the visual properties of “material cultures,” such as everyday furniture, dishes, and other functional objects. Using these studies of visual and material culture as models, art historians could undertake studies of how food’s visual properties can be aesthetically pleasing or revolting, rhetorically meaningful or vacuous, and stylistically traditional or innovative.
Art historians undertake archival research to locate the primary source material needed for our historically grounded analyses. This can be a daunting task if it is begun without strategic prioritizing. When researching art masterpieces commissioned by wealthy patrons that are now in major museum collections, the task of working in archives tends to be easier than researching lesser-known works of art or artists. The types of archival material available vary widely from project to project, but scholars commonly look at letters, diaries, and legal records. One type of archival resource that could be fruitful for a scholar of food and art is the household inventory. These have often been located for well-known artists and patrons, and they are usually part of legal inheritance records. Such inventories are usually consulted by art historians because they itemize the art in a household, but they can also be useful for food historians when the contents of kitchens are inventoried. Revisiting household inventories in conjunction with information from scholarly biographies of well-known artists could reveal what an artist usually ate, and this could be used as a critical framework. It would be germane, for example, when the art of someone like Leonardo da Vinci is scrutinized—who we know followed a near-vegetarian diet and owned a cookbook—to use this information as part of the analytical framework when interpreting his images of eating. When researching a specific work of art in a museum collection, institutional archives can also be used by art historians. Objects in the permanent collections of museums often have corresponding files, which can be accessed by appointment.
There are four major bibliographic databases in the discipline of art history. Two of them, the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA) and the Répertoire de la litterature de l’art (RILA), index scholarship published from 1975–2007. Free public access to BHA and RILA is provided by the Getty Research Institute on its website (www.getty.edu, accessed on March 29, 2012). Another database is the International Bibliography of Art, which covers scholarship published since 2008. ARTbibliographies Modern covers scholarship published since 1974 on art made since the nineteenth century. Both of the latter databases are accessible only at institutions whose libraries pay to license them.
Unfortunately, finding images of specific foods, or food-related activities, can be frustrating when using image databases. This is because imagery is notoriously difficult to catalog by theme. Nonetheless, numerous institutions have developed image databases to facilitate research. A leading database, which is available by license, is ARTstor. It contains over a million photographs of art and artifacts. Many art museums have also digitized their collections, and they usually make them available on their websites for free. Institutions that are particularly friendly toward scholars include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. Each of them has a high-quality online catalog, and their positions toward scholarly non-profit publishing of art in their collections are less restrictive than average.
Because of the limitations of image databases for thematic research, most scholars continue to browse printed books and periodicals to find compelling imagery. Books that systematically document food as a subject matter for painting, sculpture, and photography are therefore valuable references. For scholars interested in Western imagery from ancient times through the eighteenth century, the book Food in the Louvre by chefs Paul Bocuse and Yves Pinard is notable. Scholars seeking examples of visual ephemera from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including popular prints and advertisements, should refer to Food Mania by Nigel Garwood and Rainer Voigt. In photography a book by Sarah Tanguy is notable, Taken for Looks. James Yood wrote a book about paintings in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, titled Feasting. Gillian Riley’s A Feast for the Eyes similarly catalogs the works in the National Gallery of London. Silvia Malaguzzi’s Food and Feasting in Art is a superb reference book on Western painting. It addresses common iconography, allegories, settings, dishware, and cutlery. A catalog created by Linda Weintraub titled Art What Thou Eat contains a substantial number of American paintings that focus on food.
Individuals considering advanced study and research in art history should refer to resources published by the College Art Association (CAA), which is the leading academic organization for art professionals. Of particular note are the CAA directories of graduate programs in art history and related fields, such as visual studies, museum and curatorial studies, and art education. They include detailed information on curricula, admissions requirements, and opportunities for funding. Scholarships, fellowships, internships, grants, and awards programs are prevalent in the visual arts, and the CAA also publishes information about such opportunities on its website (www.collegeart.org, accessed on March 29, 2012).
Barnes, Donna (2002) Matters of Taste: Food and Drink in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art and Life. Syracuse, NY: Exhibition catalog from the Albany Institute of History and Art published by Syracuse University Press.
Bendiner, Kenneth (2004) Food in Painting: From the Renaissance to the Present. London: Reaktion Books.
Bocuse, Paul and Yves Pinard (2009) Food in the Louvre (Paris: Musée du Louvre Éditions in association with Flammarion.
Cantú, Norma E., ed., (2010) Moctezuma’s Table: Rolando Briseño’s Mexican and Chicano Tablescapes. College Station: Texas A&M University Press.
Clifton, Claire (1988) The Art of Food: Culinary Inspirations from the Paintings of the Great Masters. Secaucus, NJ: The Wellfleet Press.
Fischer, Barbara (1999) Foodculture: Tasting Identities and Geographies in Art. Toronto: YYZ Books.
Garwood, Nigel and Rainer Voigt, (2001) Food Mania. London: Thames and Hudson.
Girls Incorporated (1999) Women of Taste: A Collaboration Celebrating Quilt Artists and Chefs, Jen Bilik, ed. Lafayette, CA: Exhibition catalog from the Smithsonian Institution Travelling Exhibition Service released by C&T Publishing.
Hackforth-Jones, Jocelyn (1991) Dining with the Impressionists. New York: Konechy and Konechy.
Leaf, Alexandra and Fred Leeman (2001) Van Gogh’s Table at the Auberge Ravoux. New York: Artisan.
Lissarrague, François (1990) The Aesthetics of the Greek Banquet: Images of Wine and Ritual, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Malaguzzi, Silvia (2006) Food and Feasting in Art, translated by Brian Phillips. Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum.
Mintz, Sidney (1985) Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking.
National Gallery of Australia (2004) Eat Art. Canberra: The Gallery.
Novera, Cecilia (2010) Antidiets of the Avant-Garde: From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Riley, Gillian (1997) A Feast for the Eyes. London: National Gallery Publications distributed by Yale University Press.
Simpson, Pamela (forthcoming 2012) Corn Palaces and Butter Queens: A History of Crop Art and Diary Sculpture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Tanguy, Sarah (2006) Taken for Looks: Imaging Food in Contemporary Photography. Exhibition catalog from the Southeast Museum of Photography at Daytona Beach Community College.
Tsuchiya, Yoshio (1985) A Feast for the Eyes: The Japanese Art of Food Arrangement, food arranger Masaru Yamamoto, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter. Tokyo: Kodansha International.
Varriano, John (2009) Tastes and Temptations: Food and Art in Renaissance Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Weintraub, Linda, ed. (1991) Art What Thou Eat: Images of Food in American Art. New York: Exhibition catalog from the Edith C. Blum Art Institute at Bard College published by Moyer Bell Limited.
Yood, James (1992) Feasting: A Celebration of Food in Art. New York: Universe in association with the Art Institute of Chicago.