Vegetable Dinner

Peter Blume, Vegetable Dinner, 1927, oil on canvas, 25 ¹⁄₄ x 30 ¹⁄₄ in. (64.2 x 76.8 cm.), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase, 1984.101

Artwork Details

Title: Vegetable Dinner
Artist: Peter Blume
Date: 1927
Location: Smithsonian American Art Museum
/
Luce Foundation Center
/
4th Floor
/
34A
Dimensions: 25 ¹⁄₄ x 30 ¹⁄₄ in. (64.2 x 76.8 cm.)
Credit Line: Museum purchase
Mediums: oil
Mediums Description: oil on canvas
Classifications: Painting
Subjects: Object — vegetable — carrot
Object — vegetable — squash
Object — vegetable — potato
Architecture Interior
Waterscape — coast
Occupation — domestic — cooking
Figure group
Object Number: 1984.101
Linked Open Data: https://edan.si.edu/saam/id/object/1984.101

Artwork Description

The two women in Vegetable Dinner are both images of Peter Blume's companion Elaine, with whom he lived during the 1920s. The woman on the left, with her fashionable clothing and lit cigarette, evokes his love of parties and freedom, while the woman on the right chops vegetables to represent commitment and domesticity. This expresses Blume's conflict between his affection for Elaine, who "had very competent hands," and his need to live the bohemian life of an artist. (White, "Slicing and the Dionysian: Domesticity and the Artist in Peter Blume's Vegetable Dinner," unpublished ms., SAAM curatorial file, 1994) The dramatic cropping of the two figures, together with the knife pointing ominously at one woman's thumb, transforms this ordinary scene into something far more menacing, and suggests that neither of Elaine's roles would have made the artist completely happy. Blume eventually parted from Elaine, remembering later that their relationship was "always in a state of high tension anyway. It could never have survived as a marriage" (interview with the artist, 1983, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution).

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As a young child, Peter Blume emigrated from Russia with his family. By the time he was fifteen, he was enrolled at the Educational Alliance in the lower East Side of New York, where he learned about modern art and met many advanced artists. He painted this picture, Vegetable Dinner, when he was a precocious 21.

BETSY BROUN: As a young child, Peter Blume emigrated from Russia with his family. By the time he was 15, he was enrolled at the Educational Alliance in the Lower East Side of New York, where he learned about modern art and met many advanced artists. He painted this picture, “Vegetable Dinner” when he was a precocious 21. From this figure, and other paintings, too, we know that Blume was acquainted with past traditions, including the Egyptian habit of showing heads in strict profile and torsos in frontal view. This woman, though, seems less Egyptian, than modern Art Deco. She’s rather racy with her lighted cigarette and zig-zag pattern dress. Is it worth noting that Blume’s father worked in the clothing trade? He was a marker, noted for his ability to lay out patterns on fabric for economy of materials while keeping the patterns matched.

The Lower East Side of New York where Blume studied art was full of vegetarian restaurants. Many immigrant radicals felt that a strict avoidance of meat went well with political commitment. When Blume learned that a lot of people he admired had been vegetarians, George Bernard Shaw, Tolstoy, Shelley, he adopted the regimen for a while, also, but the vegetables being prepared in this painting seem more erotic than political. It’s interesting that we can well imagine which vegetables are male and which are female, but the gender of the potato peeler is still ambiguous.

Blume was involved with a style called “Purism,” which emphasized exquisite contours and simplified shapes. Purism deletes all the messy and confusing aspects of life, leaving a clarified, modern classicism. Blume had mastered the look as we see in these crisply drawn arms and hands. Still, there’s something in the way the knife slicing away at potato skin is poised against the vulnerable thumb, perhaps to cut more deeply. Blume could find a dark tension in this game of edges and surfaces.

The interior world is organic, but the harbor view out the window is geometric. It is so crisply rendered that it looks like a painting on the wall. Blume poises a set of sails on the woman’s shoulder as if a butterfly had alighted there. A sharply angled wall juts up against the cubist house shapes. Since it is not attached to any building, it must be there just to echo the sail shape. Best of all, Blume aligns the woman’s eye exactly with the horizon, formally unifying vision and view.

Erotic vegetables, masochistic peelers, tension and control. We sense Blume’s heightened emotional current in the balance between enigma and disclosure. Different zones occupy the canvas, uneasily coexisting but not quite touching. On one level, Blume displays his mastery by combining three traditional subjects in a single image: landscape, interior with figures, and still life. At 21, he’s showing us he has already earned his union card as an artist. On another level, he’s toying with tradition. He turns a still life of carrots and squash into reclining nude vegetables. Even his realist bowl, wall, table and window, seem to double as the ideal abstract forms of circle, square, triangle and rectangle.