GILDED BIRDS

Stephen Fry, actor, broadcaster, writer and director, on Francisco de Zurbarán’s “Still Life with Lemons, Orange and a Rose”.

GB Tell us what you’ve chosen.

SF Well, off the top of my head and because I’ve been looking lovingly at it (in reproduction, but I’ve been lucky enough to gawp at the real thing too) quite often lately for some form of aesthetic refreshment or other, I would nominate Francisco de Zurbarán’s “Still Life with Lemons, Orange and a Rose” … I can’t quite describe how and why such peace and tranquility seems to be produced by so simple and almost ploddingly literal a placement of ordinary still life subjects that have been painted a million times. He is better known, Zurbarán (“the Spanish Caravaggio”), for his religious, almost devotional,  paintings of saints and martyrs.

This still life has symbolic religious meaning, one is told, and there is assuredly something sacred about the unmediated beauty devoted to each object.

Strange – I could have easily chosen something radically different, a frothy Fragonard or lickable Kandinsky is more my usual line, but I’ve very happy to submit to you this glorious 17th-century masterpiece. It hangs in the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, a short drive from the heart of Los Angeles. Very well worth a detour. There’s a Cranach Adam and Eve (which museum doesn’t have one of those?), a Christmas Card scene from Van Gogh (as it were), a Rembrandt self-portrait as well as his exquisitely charming Portrait of a Boy. A smear of Impressionists, a Goya, a Raphael, plenty of Hindu and Buddhist statuary…  … it’s a pretty fine collection.

GB Would any work based around fruit created today ever look profound or spiritual – or is this aesthetic lost to us now?  

SF I think the still lives of Cezanne for example show that it isn’t just a Baroque and Dutch Golden Age fad. Of course we can see, or think that we can see, the “purpose” of still lives in the ages before photography. But as aesthetes and aestheticians from Wilde and Pater on have argued, “purpose” is not something one can safely apply to art, all of which is, as Oscar put it, “quite useless”. In many ways because of photography and now generative AI, the presentation of something as simple and real as a fruit or a flower, painted with reverence and devotion, might carry even more spiritual refreshment than it did four hundred years ago.

GB How is it that a lemon can bring that feeling of spirituality more strongly than a martyr?  

SF I suppose it’s something to do with the absolute lack of human drama in a lemon. It takes on therefore the abstraction of music. It isn’t “about” anything, it is free of narrative and meaning beyond its own self. There’s no fear, no ecstasy, no pain, no expression of piety or of wickedness in a lemon. Just as a Bach partita does not “represent” anything and therefore allows the mind to construct all kinds of meanings around it, so the painted lemon, though obviously “representative” in one sense, has a purity, an unmediated essence that allows for all kinds of interpretation. I am not a meditator, but I feel I enter a similar state to that claimed by practitioners, when gazing into a Zubarán lemon. It makes a focus point for a meditative state. 

GB Would you have anything to say to someone who spends $120K on a banana duct-taped to a wall? 

SF Either “You’re under arrest.” 

Or “Now come along with us. You’re going to be treated kindly, very very kindly and looked after by the best people.”

GB What makes something worthy of the word Beauty to you? 

The vibrations it sets up inside me, I suppose. The Larkin poem “For Sidney Bechet” comes to mind “Oh play that thing!” he writes, “On me your voice falls as they say love should, Like an enormous yes.” A thing of beauty falls on one like an enormous yes. I feel I’ve cheated by quoting a – beautiful – poem, but it is that feeling, not unlike the surprise and shock of love, that beauty awakens or reawakens.