A new book, The Artist's Palate, explores the connection between artistry on canvas and in the kitchen.
By LENNIE BENNETT
Published November 22, 2003
[Photo courtesy DK Publishing]
Undated photograph of Lee Krasner, Stella Pollock and Jackson Pollock in the Pollock-Krasner Kitchen at The Springs, East Hampton, Jeffrey Potter Archives.
[Photo courtesy DK Publishing]
Andy Warhol in a Supermarket Near His Factory,
Bob Adelman/ Magnum Photos, New York City, 1966.
[Photo courtesy DK Publishing]
Michelangelo, Three Different Lists of Foods Described With Ideograms, 1518, collection Archivio Buonarroti, Florence.
"Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are," Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin famously quipped in the Physiology of Taste in 1825.
Maybe so, but Brillat-Savarin would have had a hard time concluding that Edward Hopper was an exceptional artist if he based the assessment on Hopper's pedestrian love of canned tomato soup and saltines.
Still, The Artist's Palate (DK Publishing, $30), a new book by Frank Fedele, takes the idea of an embracing, overall aesthetic and runs with it, giving us who an artist is and what he or she eats. Nominally a cookbook with recipes and menus from 89 artists, it more provocatively explores the connection between the creative impulse that puts paint on canvas and food on a plate. The question raised is whether an artist with a good eye for the visual has the same discriminating taste at table.
The answer is: yes and no.
Fedele profiles living and dead painters, sculptors, printmakers and photographers. Many, such as the late Larry Rivers, he has known and worked with as a dealer and curator, visiting their homes and studios, sharing whatever was bubbling on the stove.
For long-dead artists, he searched archives for information about their eating habits or solicited relatives. In some instances, he enlisted world-class chefs to conjure specific recipes that emulated their favorite foods. Mario Batali, for example, creates Halibut in a Cool Summer Gazpacho based on a grocery list found among Michelangelo's papers. Andre Soltner recreates an elaborate dinner detailed in a letter Le Corbusier prepared for a friend.
The result of Fedele's six-year project is a quirky, original portfolio of anecdotes, quotes, letters, photographs, recipes and art that may not have the complexity of a first-rate beef bourguignon but is as entertaining as a collectively shared fondue.
It turns out artists are no different from you and me in having quotidian hungers to feed. The exception in this book is Vincent van Gogh, the only starving artist represented, who seems to have survived on bread, Gouda cheese and absinthe, sometimes chased with turpentine.
"Doing the research," Fedele said in a telephone interview, "gave me insight into how many artists' foods were comfort foods from their childhoods."
So we should not be surprised that the aristocratic, 19th-century Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (who even co-authored a book featuring his recipes and art), especially loved preparing lobster, which he ate as a child and could afford as an adult.
Or that Paul Cezanne, who hailed from Provence and painted lyrical still lifes of the fruits and vegetables grown there, would say that his preferred food was a simple dish of potatoes cooked in olive oil.
"Paints are ingredients just like spices," Fedele writes. "The artists create with paints and brushes and I was curious whether they extended that creation with new ingredients and new tools, in finding new ways to express their creativity."
In other words, does the oxtail wag the ox?
It would seem so in the case of Louise Bourgeoise, whose recipe for oxtail stew is accompanied by a photograph of Untitled, her sculpture that looks like an oozing . . . well . . . oxtail, along with a funny story about her butcher. There also is the dreary news that these days the aging artist prefers overcooked linguine with American cheese.
Sad to say, we learn that creative men can be every bit as chauvinistic as the general population. Is there something a bit misogynistic about Willem de Kooning, who painted his nude women as beautiful abstractions, having his daughter Lisa pop a fried chicken TV dinner (extra butter on the chicken) into the oven as he sits, waiting? (It should be noted that de Kooning's taste in women was not commensurate with his food choices. "He liked ugly foods," his daughter's mother, Joan Ward, writes.)
Cuban-born painter Wifredo Lam sounds like a prince of a man. His wife, Lou Laurin-Lam, said he did all the marketing and "was a genius of a cook . . . (with) the gift for providing food for many with nothing but a fish and five loaves."
Loaves figured in the culinary repertoire of that prickly pear of a fellow, Jackson Pollock, who baked his own, occasionally. He apparently preferred the precision of baking to the more spontaneous process of putting a meal together, both confirming and subverting his artistic genius for layering drips of paint that seem random but are in fact very deliberate.
The three entrees from James Rosenquist, artist of the everyday image writ large, possess the earth-bound specificity of his paintings. To his credit, none involves the canned spaghetti he celebrates in pigment.
But what is it about artists and pasta? Maybe these successful folks acquired a taste for it in their earlier days because it was cheap and easily stretched for a crowd. Whatever, Wil Barnet, who pares things down in his work, eats his daily bowl of linguine just as minimalistically, with a little olive oil, garlic and Parmesan cheese. Beverly Pepper's streamlined sculptural forms are emulated by her cooking style which makes much of very little, as in her recipe for spaghetti with lemons and anchovies.
A lesson of this book, perhaps, is that art and stomachs must be served, but not necessarily on a silver tray loaded with truffles. Unless you are the surrealist Andre Masson, whose favorite dish was a warm, new-laid egg placed in a covered bowl for 24 hours with a freshly dug up black truffle (to impart its aroma), then boiled for three minutes and served with Brittany salt. Eating said egg, "you will have, in three spoonfuls," Masson writes in the recipe, "absorbed the world."
Will you ever attempt such a dish? Probably not. But what a cool cosmological line is spun in juxtaposing Masson's recipe, in which he included his musings on eggs and truffles in general, along with his drawing, L'ouef Cosmique.
Nor are you likely to try environmental artist Alan Sonfist's Natural Dinner that would require your gathering acorns from the forest floor to roast and foraging for arcane flora such as Live Forever (a sedum). The artist thoughtfully advises us that "if the acorns are slightly bitter, they can be buried in swamp mud for a year." (Sonfist, incidentally, designed the Curtis Hixon Park in downtown Tampa that, like his menu, is intensely interesting but equally useless and will be razed when construction begins on the new Tampa Museum of Art.)
I know what you're thinking: It's the art, stupid. Indeed it is. Serious cooks won't reach for this book any more than they would rely on Alice B. Toklas' recipe for brownies.
No, you will enjoy this book for the glimpse it gives into artists' everyday lives. The truth is, Michelangelo's idea of a meal - bread, salad, anchovies and a carafe of wine - reproduced in his own handwriting, is far more elegant than Batali's slightly contrived homage. And reading about the elaborate meal Alexander Calder devised for the inaugural flight of a brightly painted jet commissioned by Braniff in 1972 is more telling of the artist's personality and ego than the sumptuous recipes fleshed out by Jean-George Vongerichten.
Fedele doesn't dig deeply into artists' psyches here but he cuts a wide swath that includes the sometimes contradictory, sometimes complementary appetites for self-expression. It's a book that can accommodate both Max Beckman's rapturous declaration: "We also love the great oceans of lobsters and oysters, the virgin forests of champagne," and Andy Warhol's renunciation of it: "Bad taste makes the day go by faster." It acknowledges the inevitable intersection of art and life, sometimes as simply as it did for Francisco Zuniga for whom "bread, wine, it is perfect, no sculpture could be done without bread and wine."
