Chardin ou la cuisine en peinture

Abstract

René Démoris : Chardin : cookery and painting. A Freudian enquiry into symbolic values of food in Chardin's painting. Most of his still-lifes concern either the preparation (things to be cooked, utensils) or the consumption (cooked things, fruit) of food. Objects are limited in number and many recur ; they are devoid of value, beauty belonging only to the picture as a whole. An analysis of La Raie — a bleeding object — reveals in various pictures the unconscious theme of harm done to the maternal body (oral-sadistic stage). Thus the world of cooking and eating induces feelings of repulsion and fascination ; this is also conjured up by the feminine domestic ritual of food, in the interior scenes. The symbolic equivalence of house and mother leads us to consider Chardin's still-lifes as a symbolic reparation (in M. Klein's sense) of the maternal body.