Bancketje+(Banquet)

Date: 2003
 * [[image:http://americanart.si.edu/images/2007/2007.21_1c.jpg link="@http://www.americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=76230"]] || Title: **Bancketje (Banquet)**

Artist: Beth Lipman Born: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 1971

Medium: glass, oak, oil and mixed media Dimensions: 72 x 240 x 33 in. (182.9 x 609.6 x 83.8 cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of the James Renwick Alliance

Accession: 2007.21 || About the Artwork (official text): Beth Lipman's tour-de-force glass sculpture //Bancketje// (2003) is a twenty-foot-long oak table laden with 400 blown and lampworked glass objects. This piece captures the visual sumptuousness and excess of a feast like the ones depicted in seventeenth-century Dutch still-life paintings called "bancketje." Like these elaborate scenes, Lipman's half-eaten morsels, overturned goblets and snuffed candles symbolically depict the transience of life. By rendering the scene in transparent glass and skillfully blending the various components, Lipman demands that the piece be seen as a whole, not an assemblage of individual objects.

Beth Lipman is renowned for her sculptural compositions which re-interpret Renaissance and Baroque still-life paintings from Holland, Flanders, and Italy, as well as from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. Lipman takes elements from these paintings—static composition, expressive light and opulent decoration—and translates the scenes into three dimensions.

Based on 17 century Dutch still-life paintings. Compare to Mawdsley (//@Feast Bracelet//). More than 400 blown glass components made with help of 15 glassmakers. Each had 2 attempts to make an object – not about perfection. About craft and ritual and decoration. Consider in totality, not in minutiae. Celebrates and mourns excess. Wreckage of gluttony. - [Source: Notes from Curator-led Walk-Throughs in the Gallery and various Catalogs]
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