“Food has never been an uncomplicated pleasure.”

- Cynthia Greenlee 

Essential to human survival and a source of great pleasure, food has been represented in art since prehistoric times. Apart from their often-sensual allure, comestibles have come to signify a host of meanings in the history of art. An example, according to Sharon Butler in “A Brief History of Food as Art,” in Smithsonian magazine, is Filippo Marinetti (1876-1944), the Italian Futurist poet, editor, and art theorist, who was the first artist in the modern era to think of the preparation and consumption of food as art. In 1932, he published The Futurist Cookbook. Not merely a collection of recipes, but a kind of manifesto, “food preparation and consumption [were] part of a new worldview, in which entertaining became avant-garde performance” (Butler). Marinetti believed the perfect meal had to feature originality, harmony, sculptural form, scent, music between courses, a combination of dishes, and variously flavored small canapés. Politics could not be discussed, and food had to be prepared in a way that eating it did not require silverware. Similarly, artists throughout history have used food as a vehicle for making statements about culture, spirituality, politics, gender, and class, among other things. 

Ancient Art 

The subject of food and art is so compelling that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has a tour devoted to the subject, led by Angelis Nannos, who hands out menus, hinting of the works he will explain, which span centuries of art history. For example, a Greek papyrus turns out to be an ancient grocery shopping list. According to Butler, Stone Age cave paintings used vegetable juice and animal fats as binding agents in paints. Ancient humans also represented their food and its spiritual significance in these cave paintings. The ancient Egyptians represented food in their funerary art, depicting it as necessary for their residence in the afterlife. The c. 1944 BC Stela of Steward Mentuwoser portrays an opulent tabletop of delicacies, a funerary banquet, likened to beliefs about the ka, or life force, that was necessary for the journey beyond death (Alexis Culotta, “The Significance of Sustenance: Food in Art History,” invaluable.com).  

The ancient Romans ascribed fruits, nuts, and grains to gods and goddesses. Bacchus, the god of wine, was depicted with grapes. He symbolized revelry and a happy afterlife. Ceres, the goddess of grain, was depicted with wheat. She embodied both virtue and vice. A floor mosaic from the emperor Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli represents a trompe l’oeil “unswept” floor—food left on the floor after banquets such as fish bones, fruit pits, nutshells, and other dining scraps. Wall frescoes show food, drink, animals, and tableware in both devotional and secular scenes. Portraying life-like looking foodstuffs was a way for painters to show off their skills, a feature of still-life painting throughout art history. Still-life images showing food-filled trays in banqueting scenes in the mosaics at the Sanctury of Palestrina (c. 80 BC) reminded the viewer of the elevated status of the individual and were a signifier of the abundance of the household. Culotta points out that food themes could also be intertwined with more complex narratives. For example, in the Lod Mosaic (300 AD), discovered near Tel Aviv, “an array of animals [blurs] the connotations of predator and prey with potential dining delights.” 

The Middle Ages  

Like the Romans, spirituality was displayed via food and drink in the art of the Middle Ages, except with Christian themes. As early as the 3rd century AD, food became intertwined with Christian symbolism. One of the most common examples is bread, which is linked to the act of Communion and Christ’s miracles. The frescoes in the Catacombs of Callixtus illustrate the Miracle of the Loaves and the Fishes, in which Christ multiplied bread and fish to feed his hungry followers. Bread often represented Christ’s body in the Eucharist and a 13th century German chalice decorated with grapes signified wine and the blood of Christ. The Last Supper, in which Christ initiated the Eucharist, is the most represented meal in art history. Later medieval manuscripts offer glimpses into past food cultures by showing the types of food eaten by different social classes, how it was made and how it was served and eaten. In Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (1412-16), food is a vehicle to show wealth and status in the depiction of elaborate banquets and parties. Overflowing tables of food display the strength and status of the noble classes. An aristocratic table laden with fine foods, however, could also point out the sin of gluttony; in some images a rich man refusing to feed a beggar lands him in hell and the poor man in heaven.  

The Renaissance 

The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries 

The 16th and 17th centuries saw the rise of the still-life painting in Europe, many of which were populated by food. In the 16th century, there was an explosion of interest in the natural world. Discoveries in the New World and Asia led to the creation of botanical encyclopedias and the beginning of scientific illustration and classification. In addition, natural objects were appreciated as individual objects of study apart from religious or mythological associations. Shells, insects, exotic fruits, and flowers were collected and traded. There was a horticultural explosion. This era marked the beginning of cabinets of curiosities, which served as models for painters who sought realism and novelty. Some regions and courts had particular preferences—the depiction of citrus, for example, was a particular passion of the Medici court in Florence, Italy. According to Wikipedia, “this great diffusion of natural specimens and the burgeoning interest in natural illustration throughout Europe, resulted in the nearly simultaneous creation of modern still-life paintings around 1600.” 

Many 16th-century still lifes employed elements of history painting. For example, Pieter Aertsten’s (1508-1575) A Meat Stall with the Holy Family Giving Alms (1551) [North Carolina Museum of Art] spreads out various meats, fish, butter, and cheese in the painting’s foreground. The items are rendered in great detail, as if the viewer were shopping at the stall. Only through an opening in the stall in the central background do we see the Holy Family distributing alms. By contrast to the food items in the foreground, the Biblical scene is small and monochromatic, except for the blue of the Virgin’s robes. Compare this image to the Spaniard Juan Sánchez Cotán’s (1560-1627) Still Life with Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber (c. 1602) [San Diego Museum of Art], from the early 17th century; the image isolates the fruits and vegetables by lining them up in the foreground, placing them on a wooden shelf and highlighting them through the austere, dark background. Cotán pioneered the Spanish still life, known as a bodegón, which featured humble pantry items. The bodegón became popular in the second quarter of the 17th century in Spain. These images different from the more lavish Dutch and Flemish still lifes and featured game, uncooked fruits and vegetables, and plain backgrounds—a sober and tranquil rejection of the sensual pleasures of still lifes of the Low Countries. The Nicaraguan artist, Armando Morales, has created a contemporary bodegón in his original color lithograph, Bodegón--Still Life: Apple, Pear, and Funnel in Box (1980) which is in the collection of the David Barnett Gallery. 

The Dutch and Flemish developed still-life in the 17th century and it flourished as an independent genre in the Netherlands, Italy, and Spain. The Italian Lombard painter Caravaggio (1571-1610) did much to advance it in the late 16th century, often incorporating still life into religious and allegorical works. His Fruit Basket (1595-96) [Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan], so realistically painted that it shocked viewers, depicts fruits that are past their prime, conveying a message about the fleeting nature of time while at the same time showing the artist’s skill. The Dutch word for “still life” is stilleven, as opposed to the use of terms meaning “dead nature” in most Romance languages. The Low Countries led Europe in both the study of botany and its depiction in art. The rise of still life was partially due to the prohibition against religious imagery by the Dutch Reformed Protestant Church. Artists continued the Northern tradition of detailed realism and hidden symbols in still life. These works appealed to the middle class, replacing Church and state as art patrons. Artists revived the ancient Greek tradition of trompe l’oeil in the imitation of nature or mimesis, known as bedriegertje (“little deception”) in Dutch. Food still lifes featured prominently in Northern European still life, signaling wealth and the intellectual engagement of its patrons. As in earlier paintings, comestibles often had symbolic significance (a reference to Biblical texts). Clara Peeters (b. 1594-?), a Flemish artist who also worked in Holland, is the only Flemish woman known to have specialized in still life painting as early as the first decade of the 17th century, despite restrictions on women’s access to artistic training and membership in guilds. She was master at depicting the material and food culture of her time, particularly that of the elites. Peeters specialized in still-life paintings with food and flowers and was prominent among the artists who shaped the traditions of ontbijtjes, “breakfast paintings,” scenes of food and simple vessels, and banketjes, “banquet paintings,” with expensive cups and vessels in precious metals. She was also interested in the play of light from different surfaces and included her reflection in metal vessels in pieces like Still Life with Nuts, Candy, and Flowers (1611) [Museo del Prado]. Many of Peeters’ paintings, despite the lushness of the subjects, carry a vanitas message of the transience of all things. In the David Barnett Gallery collection, contemporary artist Catherine Holmberg’s work, Dutch Floral Still Life with Bread Basket and Fruit (2003) is done in homage to the Northern European tradition of still life.  

The Eighteenth Century 

The Nineteenth Century 

Bill Reid’s Seafood Platter (1983), at the David Barnett Gallery is a playful, sculptural depiction of what seems to be turned up from the ocean. Rendered in glossy-painted ceramic, the work is literally a platter, scattered with various seafood (and other) ingredients. Rather than artfully arranged foodstuffs, upon closer inspection, Reid offers the viewer images that play on words and are humorously incorporated into the image. For example, on one edge of the platter, where the words “seafood platter” are printed, appears a black cat. Looking closely, however, reveals a fishtail on the cat—signifying a catfish? Interestingly, the very center of the platter is occupied by fish bones, a blackbird, and a shoe sitting atop some seaweed. On the other side of the plate, a dog with fins, a dogfish, appears to be swimming. In fact, it is unclear if everything on the platter is dead, ready to eat, as the cut lemon slice on the plate would seem to suggest. And some of the seafood does not appear to be edible. But the work foregrounds the impish, the lighthearted, and the tongue-in-cheek. 

Another 19th-century still-life depiction of food is Vollon’s Mound of Butter. Ostensibly a representation of butter sitting atop cheesecloth in front of two eggs to show its scale, Kessler reads the mass of butter as far more complex than a viewer might initially see. At first glance, the butter seems lush and creamy, rendered with luxuriant impasto and sumptuous color. Looking more closely, however, reveals that the knife on the right has nothing to hold it, it appears to be sliding down the mound of butter. Indeed, Kessler points out, “a sharp sense of volatility clings to each and every thing on this canvas. The knife, the cheesecloth, and the eggs all effectively accentuate the very tenuousness of the melting heap of butter, whose inherent ephemerality … is central to our experience of the painting” (“Clarifying and Compounding Antoine Vollon’s Mound of Butter, p. 49). The writer suggests that butter was not a common still-life subject for a reason: “it is unstable and unpredictable. It changes color, it can become rancid and smelly, and its contours shift ceaselessly as it melts” (p. 52). But, Kessler argues, Vollon chose this subject precisely because of its impermanence. “Indeed, he modeled butter into a cipher for expressing larger contemporary anxieties about its tendency to spoil quickly and its adulteration, both of which were common and justified worries, since so many kinds of foods—especially butter and other milk products—were deliberately degraded by the incorporation of additives …” (pp. 53-54). The malleability of Vollon’s butter is also significant. It allows for the shattering of “signifying boundaries” and “undoes categories” (p. 72). “It has the appearance of being entrenched both in a particular moment and in that which it indexes: a substantial mass of exposed, melting butter that sits on a wooden table. But it also looks like something rooted in a long-ago time, so compelling are its visual ties to the kinds of buried ancient civilizations that were in the course of being discovered across Europe in the late nineteenth century …” (p. 73). Kessler also points out that Vollon’s Mound of Butter recalls the heaps of earth that accumulated throughout Paris during Baron Haussmann’s renovation of the city (p. 73). Lastly, and most dramatically, Kessler reads the mound of butter as a severed head, “crudely described and in near profile” (p. 75). The slide of the knife describes the upturned chin and stops at the throat, while the top clumps indicate mouth and nose. On the left, next to the massed cheesecloth, is an ear. Kessler continues: “I have already demonstrated that butter in late nineteenth-century Paris was far from wholesome and could be secretly tainted and sold as fresh even after it turned rancid. And I have also contended that an image of this milk product could thus represent contemporary anxieties about its adulteration and larger concerns about poisoning by food. I would now like to build on these connections to argue that a depiction of butter, especially when it resembles a head detached from a body and has a blunt object sunk into it, could also manifest another weighty social concern: the continued and contentious public employment of the guillotine in Paris throughout the second half of the nineteenth century” (pp. 77-78). It seems that Vollon’s still life had exceeded the expectations of the genre in its evocation of the human body (Kessler, p. 82). The art historian argues that the “head” in Vollon’s butter evokes Théodore Géricault’s images of severed body parts, and particularly his 1818-19 Head of a Guillotined Man [The Art Institute of Chicago] (p. 86). Géricault’s grisly “still life,” or rather nature morte, is the terminus of a seemingly innocuous mound of butter. 

A master of still-life painting that incorporated food in the 19th century and into the early 20th century was Paul Cézanne (1839-1906). He was a French Post-Impressionist painter whose work introduced new modes of representation, influencing the avant-garde movements of the early 20th century. For Cézanne, still life was a vehicle for exploration in geometric spatial organization. It was also a means for removing painting from its illustrative or mimetic function. In his works, the artist illustrates the elements of color, form, and line. According to James Voorhies of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in his still-life paintings from the 1870s, Cézanne “began to address technical problems of form and color by experimenting with subtly gradated tonal variations, or ‘constructive brushstrokes,’ to create dimension in his objects” (Voorhies, James. “Paul Cézanne (1839–1906).” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/pcez/hd_pcez.htm (October 2004)). Still Life with Apples and a Pot of Primroses [The Metropolitan Museum of Art], a mature work from about 1890, “reveals Cézanne’s artistic evolution and mastery of this style of building forms completely from color and creating scenes with distorted perspectival space. The objects in this painting, such as the fruit and tablecloth, are rendered without use of light or shadow, but through extremely subtle gradations of color” (Voorhies). “Cézanne’s use of color to convey the fullness of the area around objects, along with his complexly layered surfaces and sometime puzzling arrangements, were new ways of representing form and space. With close looking, they draw the viewer’s attention to the painting process itself” (The Art Institute of Chicago). For the artist, as for the Fauves and Cubists who were deeply influenced by the painter, the works are less about the objects in the painting than how they are rendered.   

The Twentieth Century 

Henri Matisse (1869-1954) famously said “What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity … something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.” His lush still lifes offer that sense of calm and balance while at the same time being totally revolutionary. Matisse is considered one of the greatest artistic innovators of the 20th century and he served as an influence on many artists who followed him. He greatly admired the art of Chardin and as an art student he made copies of four of Chardin's paintings in the Louvre. Matisse’s Blue Still Life (Nature morte bleue) [The Barnes Foundation] from Summer 1907 displays fruits, pottery, and a plant on a blue and white patterned toile de Jouy tablecloth. According to Karen K. Butler, Matisse had been studying the works of Cézanne, who died in 1906, and Cézanne’s influence can be seen in the tension between two and three dimensions. The foreground and background are flattened together through the artist’s use of pattern. “Space is reduced to a shallow plane; only the foreshortened tabletop seems to project out perpendicularly toward the surface of the picture plane. … Though the space is shallow and compact, it is three-dimensional: the vertical foreground plane show the toile de Jouy—a blue-and-white patterned cloth—as it falls down from the table; the tabletop itself, suggesting a receding horizontal plane; and the upright vertical of the screen and curtain all unfold in depth like the steps of a staircase. Also at work, though, is a rhythmic arabesque that flows throughout the picture, uniting the various elements and folding up space like an accordion, so that everything is pressed flat against the surface of the canvas. Repetitions of shapes and colors contribute to this flattening rhythm, for example in the shape of the large basket of flowers [printed] on the toile de Jouy which is paralleled in the two-handled jar just above it, or in the multiple round shapes of the fruit scattered across the table” (Butler, Matisse in the Barnes Foundation, vol. 2, New York: Thames & Hudson, 2015, pp. 153-54).   

Warren Brandt’s (1918-2002) superb still lifes, which are in the collection of the David Barnett Gallery, owe much to Matisse. In Mexican Still Life with Sculpture (1981) and Papaya and Mexican Pitcher (1981), Brandt uses saturated color to represent fruit that looks good enough to eat. The artist also employs pattern that helps to eliminate traditional perspective and gravity. The New York Times’ art critic Phyllis Braff praised Brandt’s still lifes’ “luminosity and radiance,” She compared Brandt’s structural approach to Cézanne’s belief in the independent reality of a painting’s design. Braff also saw the influence of Matisse in the painter’s handling of depth and surface and his use of “brilliant bold color and exotic pattern.” Catherine Holmberg also employs Matissean color in her Still Life with Peaches and Grapes (2001), also in the David Barnett collection. 

In the art of Dada nothing is as it first seems to be. For example, Marcel Duchamp’s (1887-1968) Why not Sneeze, Rose Sélavy? (1921) [Philadelphia Museum of Art], an “assisted readymade,” appears to consist of 152 sugar cubes in a small bird cage with a thermometer, a cuttlebone, and two small ceramic dishes. However, upon closer inspection, the “sugar” is actually marble made to resemble sugar cubes. Duchamp said “It is a Readymade in which the sugar is changed to marble. It is sort of a mythological effect.” The work plays on the contradiction between light sugar and heavy marble, and the incongruity of a birdcage outfitted for a bird but filled with “sugar.” The thermometer “is ostensibly taking the temperature of the cold marble” (Museum of Modern Art) as opposed to what Duchamp described as the “heat-giving” properties of sugar cubes. Duchamp also acknowledged the folly of the title’s question, noting, “You can’t sneeze at will!” (MoMA). A sneeze in an involuntary climax, not unlike an orgasm; the title challenges the logical constraints of desire and the body. The absurdist title, written on the underside of the work, highlights the name of Duchamp’s female artistic alter ego—Rose Sélavy, or when pronounced slowly, "Éros c’est la vie” (Eros is life).  

With Pop Art of the 1960s, food began to be looked at in a different light, in part as social metaphor and “an ode to and a critique of industrial food” (Iris Chalvin, “Food in Art,” Artsper Magazine, 3/18/2026).  Andy Warhol’s (1928-1987), Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962) [Museum of Modern Art], carefully hand-painted, paradoxically depicts variety and sameness. The artist’s serialization of the soup cans makes them look like items on grocery store shelves. Warhol claims to have eaten Campbell’s soup every day for twenty years! Soup Cans can be seen as a metaphor for American plenty as well as for commercialization. Pop Art inaugurated a new form of still life. Works representing food were based on still life, but the true subject is the commodified image of the commercial product represented rather than the physical still-life object itself, blurring the line between advertising art and the art of the museum.  

Wayne Thiebaud (1920-2021), another Pop artist, represented food, primarily desserts in retail spaces. Cakes (1963) [National Gallery of Art] and Italian Desserts (1979) [David Barnett Gallery] overlap with Warhol’s work in its predilection for seriality; however, Thiebaud’s food lacks the flatness of Pop Art. In Cakes, for example, the thick impasto mimics the frosting on the pastries. Apart from what is represented, the artist operates with an underlying structure that he owes to Cézanne: the oval, the cone, the sphere, and the triangle (Béatrice Troitignon, “Wayne Thiebaud, 29 January-21 May 22023, Fondation Beyeler, Basel,” Transatlantica, vol. 2, 2024). Working in food service as a child, Thiebaud often sketched desserts on display. He was fascinated with the rituals and cultural meanings associated with food, particularly in the context of diners and bakeries. A child of the Depression, Thiebaud may have been influenced by the unattainable nature of food, especially in display cases. The juxtaposition of abundance and scarcity in his work reflects this experience. He saw food as a form of theatre—pasties were “characters” on stage. Thiebaud displays signature techniques in his art, drawn from his work in film and commercial art; aggressive frontality; a tightly packed composition; insistent flatness; syncopation; a spectral palette; stage lighting; and colored shadows (Elaine O’Brien, “Wayne Thiebaud; A Celebration, 1920-2021,” and “Wayne Thiebaud 100: Paintings, Prints, and Drawings,” Crocker Art Museum, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 8 no. 2, (Fall 2022)). “With lavish care and skill, Thiebaud gave the barely noticed things of this world the charisma of movie stars, staging them carefully and visually tipping their performances in the viewer’s space” (O’Brien). “Bright and shiny as they are, [Thiebaud’s] still lifes seem to contradict the meditative, metaphysical undertones of the genre while ironically underlining the artificial promises of material excess. The cakes and counters are set against white, void backgrounds, as though they were not actually part of reality, just ‘pies in the sky’ so to speak, or beckoning dreams, and at best nostalgic memories” (Troitignon). 

Roy Lichtenstein’s (1923-1997) and Dennis Pearson’s (b. 1939), Turkey Pie—Roy Lichtenstein Homage (1964-65), in the collection of the David Barnett Gallery, employs Pop Art in a playful rendition of the Thanksgiving turkey. The work is a canvas shopping bag printed with Lichtenstein’s turkey pie in the center and decorated with whimsical colored turkeys “dressed and undressed” by Dennis Pearson. The central image is a silkscreen which displays Lichtenstein’s signature use of Ben-Day dots—a mechanical printing technique that the artist did by hand in his paintings. The turkey pie appears like an advertising image from a grocery store, and with the printed shopping bag explores themes of consumerism, homemaking, and the commodification of the Thanksgiving holiday. Compare Lichtenstein’s and Pearson’s turkeys to Robert Richter’s (b. 1954) New Year Bird (2014) [David Barnett Gallery]. Richter incises his images into wood and then paints between the lines. The artist presents a homely image of the New Year bird. 

In a return to realist representation, Alicia Czechowski (b. 1945) presents food-based still lifes in Persimmons, Tangerines and Blue Kerchief (1969) and Gloxinia and Slice of Torte (1997) [both works at the David Barnett Gallery]. As a child in Detroit, Czechowski copied Old Master paintings, and the influence of these works show in the artist’s still lifes. The artist rejects “visual formalism” for painting “unencumbered by over-intellectualism.” The painter, like those Dutch masters, often expresses decadence and decay in her work. In her gouache Gloxinia and Slice of Torte, Czechowski depicts a decadent and beautifully decorated piece of cake and in the watercolor Persimmons, Tangerines and Blue Kerchief the artist presents a persimmon, shaded in brown, on the left that might be beginning to turn bad. These works evoke the Old Master vanitas message that all that is beautiful and living must eventually die.  

The Twenty-First Century 

Tom Shelton’s (c. 1942-?) contemporary works of fruits in mixed media evoke a Pop and Minimalist sensibility. For example, Six Fruits (2017) and Lemon (36) (2017), both at the David Barnett Gallery, are arranged on a modernist grid. Like Pop Art of the early 1960’s when Warhol hand painted Campbell’s Soup Cans, Shelton renders each fruit and lemon differently, with botanical precision (the artist was a botany major in college). This analytical attention to detail recalls the Dutch still-life painters. However, the fruits are organized on a grid, which gives them a clinical sensibility. Shelton’s work hovers between botanical visual fidelity and Minimalist anti-referentiality in order to bring to light the objective, visual components of art.  

Food in art has also been used as a societal and historical critique, as in Kara Walker’s (1969) A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby (May 2014), commissioned by Creative Time New York in the soon-to-be-demolished Domino Sugar factory in Brooklyn. Best known for her cut-paper silhouettes and tableaus that “complicate traditional narratives of power and repression,” Walker created a colossal, sugar-coated sculpture of a “sphinx-turned-mammy” (Nato Thompson, Chief Curator Creative Time, from curatorial statement) and fifteen life-size sugar and molasses African American child attendants. The full title of the work is “at once poetic and descriptive” (creativetime.org): At the behest of Creative Time Kara E. Walker has confected: A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant. Walker said that she “[wanted] to make a piece that would complement [the Domino’s sugar factory], … echo it, and hopefully contain these assorted meanings about imperialism, and slavery, about the slave trade that traded sugar for bodies and bodies for sugar.”   

The sculpture is called a subtlety, which was an elaborate sugar or marzipan confection, ornate in construction and ornamentation, often edible and served at the courts of England and France in the 15th century when sugar was a luxury commodity. The purpose of the subtlety was to fool or trick the eye into seeing beyond its materials to the unusual and mythical. A subtlety is creative and prompts creativity from its audience. Guests were expected to comment on it. “Unlike with many other performance genres, the subtlety relies on ingenuity from the audience … in order to be successful. It also depends on a unique form of ingenuity: playing with nature.” Walker’s Subtlety, the sugar-coated figures on a monumental scale, are perhaps less subtle, but as Nato Thompson points out, not everyone is aware of the multiple interpretations of the sphinx and her attendants and may take the work at face value as a racist and sexualized image of black bodies. 

The coated-sugar sculpture is a female sphinx figure and was represented on a massive scale: it measured approximately 75 feet long by 35 feet high. Walker wanted to evoke the image of the sphinx, emblematic of a ruin and also suggesting the ruin of the sugar factory, which would be demolished after the artist’s installation. Imbedded in the concept of the ruin is the evocation of memory and loss, as well as a critique of our fascination with the monumentality of the work. The author Zadie Smith has commented on public monuments in the context of Walker’s art: “Monuments are complacent; they put a seal upon the past; they release us from dread. For Walker, dread is an engine: it prompts us to remember and rightly fear the ruins we shouldn’t want to return to and don’t wish to recreate—if we’re wise” (The New York Review of Books, February 27, 2020). This monument of a stereotyped African woman is something Walker creates to comment on the historically troubled coded messages of the past. 

A Subtlety also takes up in an overt way the mythologizing of black women’s bodies. Thompson continues: “Presiding over the cavernous Domino building in seeming repose, Walker’s sphinx is a hybrid of two distinct racist stereotypes of the black female: She has the head of a kerchief-wearing black female, referencing the mythic caretaker of the domestic needs of white families, especially the raising and care of their children, but her body is a veritable caricature of the overly sexualized black woman, with prominent breasts, enormous buttocks, and protruding vulva that is quite visible from the back. If this evocation of both caregiver and sex object—complicated by her coating in white sugar—feels offensive, it is meant to. It is part of what Walker has come to be known for.” 

“Walker has appropriated racist imagery throughout her career, frequently depicting scenes of intense violence and sex that are peculiarly—and uncomfortably—alluring. As she herself has said, she likes her work to produce a sense of ‘giddy discomfort.’ This is our response not only to the sphinx, but also to the procession of black boys that serve as her attendants. Scaled-up versions of tchotchkes that Walker came across on Amazon, they have big, sweet eyes, and they carry bananas and baskets. Typically for Walker, they are both racist objectifications and strangely cute and compelling.”  

Walker has said that sugar itself is associated with “whiteness” which is equated with “purity.” It is ironic then that the Domino Sugar company donated the sugar for this installation given that A Subtlety means to critique the role of sugar in the international slave trade. Art critic Jamilah King wrote that “the exhibit itself is a striking and incredibly well-executed commentary on the historical relationship between race and capital, namely the money made off the backs of black slaves on sugar plantations throughout the Western Hemisphere” (Jamilah King, “The Overwhelming Whiteness of Black Art,” May 21, 2014). Thompson adds to this aspect of the work: “If the racial and sexual connotations inherent in the sphinx and her attendants were not enough, Walker’s work is also about sugar and the history of its production and trade. It is a story of slavery and a triangular trade route that ensured a sufficient quantity of slaves, of industrial power, our contemporary culture of overconsumption, and much more. In fact, in researching sugar as she developed the work, Walker looked at thousands of years of history (as evidenced by her use of a sphinx).” 

In conclusion, “Walker’s gigantic temporary sugar-sculpture speaks of power, race, bodies, women, sexuality, slavery, sugar refining, sugar consumption, wealth inequity, and industrial might that uses the human body to get what it needs no matter that cost to life and limb. Looming over a plant whose entire history was one of sweetening tastes and aggregating wealth, of refining sweetness from dark to white, [the sphinx] stands mute, a riddle so wrapped up in the history of power and its sensual appeal that one can only stare stupefied, unable to answer” (Thompson). 

As I have demonstrated, works of art that feature food often reveal other issues. Foodstuffs can be allegories for virtue, vice, value, and vanitas. Food can emphasize eroticism, exoticism, or wealth. Food can be comforting, but it can also signal decay. Modernist painters like Cézanne and Matisse used food and still life to advance what modern art could look like. And contemporary artists explore modern aspects of food culture—globalization, racism, sexism, capitalism, imperialism, and consumerism, to name just a few things. In short, our relationship to food as human beings is constant and complex, and it is no wonder that art should take food as a perpetual subject.

By Jennifer McCormick