Still Life with Flowers 1913

Maurice Prendergast’s "Still Life with Flowers", painted with oil on canvas, captures a vase overflowing with color. The thick, deliberate strokes of paint are not about replicating life, but rather about the labor that goes into creating an aesthetic experience. Notice how the materiality of the paint itself—its texture, weight, and color— takes precedence over any illusion of depth or realism. Prendergast worked and reworked the surface of the canvas. The density of the brushstrokes suggests a kind of repetitive, almost obsessive, process. In doing so, he creates a visual tension, that reflects the larger social contexts of labor and production. The subject matter itself - a bourgeois display of cut flowers - speaks to an economy of leisure, and its dependence on often invisible labor. Ultimately, Prendergast prompts us to reconsider the value we assign to both artistic creation, and the world of work that sustains it.