Artists and their food

August 1, 2008 5:03 AM

What do you know about specific visual artists and their relationship to food?

I imagine there are stories from both ends of the spectrum: surviving on nothing but canned tuna fish while focusing exclusively on work, and a lusty immersion in the sensuality of smells, colors, and flavors.

posted by StickyCarpet to food & drink (6 answers total)

The Florentine renaissance painter Piero di Cosimo is supposed to have 'lived largely on hard-boiled eggs, which he prepared 50 at a time while boiling glue for his artworks'.
posted by misteraitch at 5:43 AM on August 1, 2008

Well, if you count performance as a "visual" art, this book has a huge section devoted to interviewing artists and their relationship to food - both personally and in their work.
posted by mykescipark at 6:07 AM on August 1, 2008

Salvadore Dali was a big fan of spaghetti with meatballs.
posted by sour cream at 7:41 AM on August 1, 2008

Giuseppe Archimboldo:

an Italian painter best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of such objects as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish, and books -- that is, he painted representations of these objects on the canvas arranged in such a way that the whole collection of objects formed a recognisable likeness of the portrait subject.

Also:

royal painter and imperial party planner to sixteenth-century Italian emperors; Ferdinand I, Maximilian II, and Rudolf II.

The centerpieces at those parties must have been something to see.
posted by jamjam at 10:40 AM on August 1, 2008

I recall reading that Christo has unusual food habits. It may have been this NY Magazine article:

“Sometimes he comes down to eat raw garlic, which he eats three times a day,” says Jeanne-Claude. “A total of one head of garlic a day, raw, like candies. With some yogurt. And sometimes a glass of soy milk. That takes him about three minutes. Then back to the studio.”

But I think it was something else. Maybe search through archives of the New Yorker and the the New York Times.
posted by stuart_s at 10:42 AM on August 1, 2008

Joseph Cornell lived pretty much entirely on sweets.

Cornell's dealings with the art world were unorthodox; dealers, collectors and even curators interested in his work usually had to make a pilgrimage to Utopia Parkway, where they were served a light tea and refreshments at the kitchen table. (As one dealer remarked, Cornell, who had a sweet tooth, was fond of ''industrial-strength glazed doughnuts from the supermarket.'')
posted by neroli at 11:00 AM on August 1, 2008