Psychotic Celery

“Close on 400 years ago, a Spanish painter, no longer young, went into his studio in the Carthusian monastery in Granada, Spain, and looked long and closely at a distinctly uncharismatic vegetable. That vegetable – known in English, where known at all, as a cardoon – forthwith became the protagonist in an image, the like of which had never quite been seen before in European art. In so-called ”reality” the cardoon looks like psychotic celery, with thorns, bristles and spikes to protect itself, But its proportions are grand, its color unexpectedly subtle, and its profile both suggestive and ambiguous. As raw in character as in fact, it is not a vegetable to mess with.

The painter who was to give it a dignity beyond the dreams of parsnip, pumpkin or asparagus was called Juan Sanchez Cotan. In his middle 40’s at the time, he had not long before given up a favored position among the brilliant and sophisticated legal and ecclesiastical society of Toledo in order to become a lay brother in the Charterhouse in Granada. It was not the first time that he had painted a cardoon, but on previous occasions it had figured as an element among others in the new kind of painting – since called ‘’still life” – in which fruit, vegetables and dead birds lead a life all their own and were no longer mere accessories to the main action.”

John Russell, “Art View: Still Lifes by Spain’s Great Master” NY Times 6/16/85