When I was in New York last month, I went to see some of the
Impressionist and Cubist paintings at the Met and MoMA. I especially like the
Impressionists and Cezanne, who sort of bridged the gap between Impressionism
and Cubism, but some of the Cubist stuff looks pretty silly to me (although I
do like it). And when you look at the works of these Cubist artists (and many Impressionists leading up to Cubism), there is an inordinate number of still-life paintings, unusually containing fruit. I also noticed that my parents get fruit baskets from Harry &
David, I guess sent to them as a gift from someone. And this collision of these
ridiculous-looking still-life fruit paintings and the idea of mail-order fruit
baskets made me think of something silly.
Wouldn’t it be fun to have a company that would send Cubist
fruit baskets, where the fruit would look exactly like the silly-looking fruit
from the Picasso, Braque, Cezanne, etc., still-life paintings? They could call
it: “Pablo & Georges’s Cubist Fruit Baskets: As Seen in Art Museums”, and the
fruits would be all distorted-looking and silly. (With all the recent strides in genetic engineering, they must be able to do this sort of thing by now, right?) It’s the perfect gift for the
art lover in your life!
(It’s truly amazing how many still-life paintings of fruit
these guys painted. If they were painting what they were eating, then while
their images may have been quite irregular, they themselves must have been very “regular” indeed!)
Here’s what your basket of fruit might look like when it
arrived (Doesn’t it look delicious?):
