While it’s not the case that all roads in modern and contemporary art lead back to Marcel Duchamp, it’s certainly a well-trodden path. He is often referred to as “the forefather of conceptual art”, and for good reason. Conceptual art is when the idea behind a work of art is as important as the actual finished piece. It grew as a movement in the 1960s and 1970s, in Europe, and North and South America, but has as its roots firmly planted in 1917, with Duchamp’s Fountain.  

What does conceptual art look like if it is the thought process that counts? Well, it could be anything – a performance, a film, a photograph, or an installation – and often took the form of found objects.

For example, take the work of Damien Hirst, who is perhaps most famous for placing animals in tanks of formaldehyde such as sharks, sheep, and cows. It’s like a contemporary version of a memento mori. Or Tracey Emin’s bed, the same bed she spent four days in while depressed and distraught, drinking and smoking after a bad break up. She famously said, “Art is not for looking at, art is for feeling”. 

Let’s pause for a second and consider the concept of found objects, also referred to using the French equivalent, objets trouvés. This is when artists make artworks with objects they find around them, especially those that aren’t usually seen as something to make art with.

In most cases the object is found, but sometimes it has been bought. It can be natural or humanmade, incorporated into artworks exactly as it is, or modified in some way. An artist might choose an object for its shape or material, or because it seems to tell a story.

And as we know from Marcel Duchamp, when the object chosen is manufactured, it is called a readymade.

When different found objects are arranged together, this is called an assemblage, as in Nam June Paik’s arrangement of irons in Flux Feet (1974). Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was the ever-inventive Cubist artists, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, who first used found objects, when they started to include wallpaper and old newspapers in Cubist collages in 1912.

In 1914 the direction of art and art history was changed for ever. This sounds dramatic, but it’s true. Why? Because a rebellious French artist called Marcel Duchamp started to put ordinary objects into a gallery and call them art. 

Duchamp said that by simply choosing the object, putting it into a new context – in this case a gallery – and saying it was art made the object become a work of art.

Duchamp called these objects readymades – manufactured objects, already made or modified, like a bicycle wheel or a bottle rack. Sometimes they were left exactly as they were, or sometimes changed in some way. Today, his most famous readymade is Fountain, a urinal which he placed upside down on a pedestal and signed with a fake name.

Duchamp’s actions flew in the face of tradition in completely new ways, but he wasn’t alone. He was part of a group called Dada, founded by writer Hugo Ball in Zurich in 1915, whose influence soon spread to Berlin, New York and Paris.

It was Dada’s raison d’être (“reason for being”) to be provocative and “anti-art”, to outrage and offend. The Dadaists rejected art as something unique, beautiful, or skillfully made, and replaced it with commonplace objects, political poetry, and absurd acts of chance. Dada attracted artists, writers, performers, and musicians who were anarchic and angry at the senseless horrors of the First World War.

The name Dada comes from a French word for a “hobby horse”. It was a word plucked at random from a dictionary and was meant to be nonsensical.

Ever since this moment, the door has been open for pretty much anything to be used by artists to create work, paving the way for Surrealism, Pop Art and Conceptual Art.

As the history of western art evolved, the subject matter of paintings became known as “genres” and some were considered more important than others.

These genres had a hierarchy which became established in the 17th century by the French Academy of Fine Arts (Académie des Beaux-Arts). It went as follows… 

In first place was history painting, featuring subjects from classical history, mythology, and the Bible, as well as more recent historical events. Next up was portraiture, capturing the great and the good, followed by genre painting, with a focus on scenes of everyday life, such as people having a party or going to the market (not to be confused with the term “genre” described above). 

Trailing in fourth place, was landscape painting, and then, finally, the lowly still life, at the bottom of the heap. Landscape and still life did not feature people and so were seen as far less important. 

This is a still life. But what does that mean? That the objects are still? Yes. That they do not move? Yes. That it is a representation of life, so it shows things that are alive? No. Well, sometimes yes, but often they are dead, or dying.

In essence, still life is a subject in art that refers to anything that does not move – an inanimate object which can be natural or humanmade, or, frankly, dead.

But where does the term come from?

While still life as a subject in art has been around for literally ages – for example, it has been found in Ancient Egyptian tombs, and pops up all over the place in medieval and Renaissance altarpieces; it only became used as an actual term in the 17th century Netherlands.

The English term “still life” stems from the Dutch “stilleven”, which means “quiet life”. The French called it nature morte and in Italy it became natura morta which both mean “dead nature” – except, remember, not everything in a still life is dead…