Luis Meléndez was an incredible painter. It takes about two seconds to register that. It’s only when you spend a bit of time with his mesmerizing still lifes that your admiration for his virtuosity starts to float away and mutate into a very different, dangerously unstable feeling.
It’s a feeling that’s wholly out of tune with most people’s preconceptions about 18th-century art - closer, in fact, to the effects the Surrealists began trying to cultivate in the 1920s and ’30s.
Meléndez painted still lifes - that is to say, arrangements of fruit and vegetables, meat and game, bread, cooking equipment, and cutlery on plain wooden tables against dark backgrounds (and occasionally landscapes).
It all sounds pretty prosaic. But Meléndez - like his Spanish successors, Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, two centuries later - grasped that intense scrutiny could produce an effect of hair-raising weirdness. His pictures have a hothouse intensity that turns visual truth into a kind of glittering mirage. You could think of them as still lifes on steroids, without the detrimental side-effects.
I can’t imagine anyone being bored by this exhibition, which has come to the Museum of Fine Arts from the National Gallery of Art in Washington via the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It pairs still lifes in American collections (including two from the collection of Teresa Heinz and two from the MFA) with related paintings from Europe, most notably the Prado in Madrid. Under the guidance of the MFA’s Ronni Baer, the show’s 30 paintings have been beautifully installed here in a single, uncluttered room with filtered light.
Meléndez was a show-off. Thanks largely to his father, a noted painter whose temper tantrums torpedoed both his own and his son’s potential for an official career at Spain’s royal court, he had an ill-starred and unhappy career. But for a demonstration of vaunting self-confidence, just take a look at the picture that opens the show (and the only one that is not a still life). It’s a self-portrait from the Louvre, painted when the artist was 30 or 31.
The young Meléndez, blessed with smooth but smoldering good looks, stares out at us with dark, unflappable eyes. His right hand holds a gold-plated chalk holder, and the delicately painted fingers of his left display a large sheet of paper with a black chalk study of a male nude.