The curators of The Shape of Things: Still Life in Britain, an exhibition at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester that could hardly be more enjoyable if it tried, refuse to get too hung up on the idea that a chipped jug might bear witness to turmoil; that stained teapots really have heard it all. Their preference is for the history of art, not jagged human hearts. But in the end, there’s really nothing they can do. How intimate objects are, and how voluble! Again and again, this show made me think of Philip Larkin’s Home Is So Sad, a poem that speaks with exquisite directness to the ironical notion that possessions embody loss (“Look at the pictures and the cutlery./ The music in the piano stool. That vase.”) A still life, if it is to have meaning, must somehow conjoin absence and presence: the unseen hand that arranged those flowers; the blurred face we see reflected in that pewter bowl.
Such a relationship reaches its zenith in Rachel Whiteread’s Untitled (Pink Torso), a sculpture from 1991 that takes the shape of the interior of a full hot-water bottle. Absence, in this instance, is literally made solid, courtesy of some pink dental plaster. But at Pallant House you feel the connection at every turn – and should you fail to do so, the work in question will strike you immediately as a failure. I was left cold by those pictures for which the artist carefully arranged a series of objects prior to painting them – tableaux that feel stagey and pointlessly challenging, like a tea tray memory game gone wrong. Meredith Frampton’s Trial and Error (1939), starring a pear, an urn, some scissors and a mannequin’s head (among other things), is inert for all its deliberation; Edward Wadsworth’s Bright Intervals (1928), a nautical pageant comprising a shell, binoculars and many fishing floats, is irredeemably flat. Both belong to the interwar years, when sleek “structural purpose” (as Paul Nash put it) was all the rage: a pointed slight on the Bloomsbury group and its fuzzy, Cézanne-inspired fruit bowls.
But failure is rare in this exhibition. Comprising 150 or so works by more than 100 artists, it’s full of surprises and unveiled jewels from private collections. If its approach, focused on the 20th century, is strictly chronological – this is the first major show to be devoted to the British still life, and the gallery is determined to take the matter seriously – the term is also defined loosely to encompass installations such as Cornelia Parker’s Falling Facade (1991), in which flattened silver trophies hang from an easel before a mirror (a shimmering comment on the flimsy nature of success); joyful driftwood constructions by Margaret Mellis such as Toy Cupboard (Thirty) (1983); and the witty stitched piece Donuts, Coffee Cups and Comic (1962) by Jann Haworth.
Such names are indicative, too, of something else that’s brilliant about this show: a large number of its artists are women and, having more than earned their place, arrive without any patronising fuss. In one room, Walter Sickert’s Mushrooms (c1919-20) hangs beside Still Life With a Lobster (c1923) by his one-time pupil Sylvia Gosse. They look well together, but it’s Gosse’s oil that draws the eye, her lobster enclosed by a metal cheese mesh for modernity’s sake – it’s almost (but not quite) a feminist commentary on domestic labour – even as her potatoes and thick slab of bacon look back to the 17th century.
The beginnings of still life in Britain may be traced to the Netherlands: like so many other good things, it was a foreign import. Early examples belonged to the tradition of vanitas (representations of worldly goods painted alongside symbols of mortality) and memento mori, and several hang at the start of the show “in dialogue” with modern work that riffs on them. I was resistant to this idea at first: Patrick Caulfield’s acrylic Reserved Table (2000), which quotes Willem Kalf’s Still Life With the Drinking-Horn of the Saint Sebastian Archers’ Guild, Lobster and Glasses (c1653), is a cheap visual gag beside its inspiration. But then I found Mat Collishaw’s Last Meal on Death Row, Texas (Louis Jones Junior) (2012), which looks from afar to be by an old master but is in fact a digital transfer print. Once you grasp that the exotic fruit it portrays represents the request of a real prisoner shortly before he died by lethal injection, its appearance, unblemished and luscious, seems nothing short of obscene.
From here, we vault to the early 20th century. William Nicholson’s The Silver Casket and Red Leather Box (1920) is the picture you’ll revisit later, its beauty and serenity setting a standard for all that lies ahead (including paintings by his son Ben). A hand may be glimpsed in the sheen of the silver: the same hand, perhaps, that wears the soft grey gloves draped below (Nicholson was famously dandyish). How did he do it, you wonder as you contemplate the casket’s astonishing lustre – a shine that both promises and withholds. In the next rooms are paintings by the Scottish colourists and members of the Camden Town group; by followers of surrealism, modernism and abstraction, as well as by contemporary artists. And there’s a lot to say about all of them, touched as they are by two world wars, 50s austerity and the rapid rise of consumerism. But Nicholson calls you, always: an artist who belonged to no group or movement, and who never said anything much in public about his work.
Hereafter, the chief pleasure of this exhibition lies in its repletion – the happy sense that you never quite know what’s next: Prunella Clough, Eric Ravilious, David Hockney, Mona Hatoum, Lubaina Himid, Lee Miller. All any reviewer can really do is to offer some highlights. I thrilled to sight of Lucian Freud’s Unripe Tangerine (1946-47), so small and green it resembles an olive, and how good to see Keith Vaughan’s Still Life With Skull (1952-53). When I got home, I ransacked his Journals, 1939-1977 in search of an entry I recalled from 1945, when the artist, a conscientious objector, was working in a PoW camp. “In front of me on the table are some flowers standing in a brown medicine bottle,” he writes. “Every two or three days, they are renewed by the German gardener who cleans out the room in the morning.” Though his oil has no flowers – a coffee grinder sits next to the skull of the title, vaguely reminiscent of some armament – he knew all about the uncommon beauty of the everyday object.
But if I had to pick just one picture, it might be Black and White (c1932) by the too little known Dod Procter (1892-1972). On a hall table lies an ermine muffler, a pair of long evening gloves and a silk scarf. Someone is going out – or they’ve just come in. It’s wonderfully painted: again, a sense of a presence off-camera. But its title is a beautiful lie. Nothing is black and white here. It’s the beginning of a novel. I looked at it and longed more than anything to know the rest of the story.
• The Shape of Things: Still Life in Britain is at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, until 20 October
