EAT
Your
Art
Out
iered platters heaped with berries and
glistening, open-mouthed fishes; mile-long
tables set for dozens; and massive portions of everything from cheese to wine overfilling their vessels — if this is what pops into mind with the word “maximalism,” it’s hardly a coincidence. Millennia of art depicting this kind of excess laid the groundwork for what we’re seeing now in 2023’s most over-the-top dining rooms and dinner parties.
In Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s 1888 Roses of Heliogabalus, where the Roman emperor lounges with guests around an overflowing table, a torrent of rose petals suffocates the crowd. If a seder is a banquet, then maybe any Last Supper scene counts; the list would get out of hand if we included picnics, naked or otherwise. References to excess are as varied as the days-long feast in the first-century CE Roman farce The Satyricon (and Fellini’s 1969 adaptation); descriptions of luscious, sopping fruit juices in Christina Rosetti’s 1862 poem “Goblin Market”; and even the pastry-laden set design of Sofia Coppola’s 2006 version of Marie Antoinette.
So the buffets piled with everything and 20-scoop sundaes of today didn’t come from nowhere, and they’re certainly not new for the mid-2020s. As proof, here’s a very lopsided timeline of art history’s greatest maximalist hits.
T
What we collectively think of as decadent looks that way because it’s been signaled to us over and over via art history, which is crammed with excessive banquet scenes and mass quantities of food: The Etruscans (mid-first millennium BCE) put them on funerary monuments. An acrobat and a juggler entertain the guests in a Han Dynasty (25 to 200 BCE) relief.
About 2600 BCE
It’s a metaphor, but hear me out: A cylinder seal works by rolling over clay to leave an impression of the design carved into it — in this case, a party. By nature, the seal can roll on and on forever, the party never stopping. On this particular specimen, people are drinking out of big shared jugs with straws and playing games; there are religious meanings to these objects, but they also show that in ancient times, people liked to have fun at a good dinner party with their friends, which, relatable.
Seals like this were used in Mesopotamia as early as 3400 BCE; they never fully went out of style in ancient Western Asia. Some were made of precious materials, like one with a banquet scene in the British Museum from the gold-packed burial of Queen Puabi, carved from lapis lazuli. The banquet scenes on them could feature food, drink, or both, and usually signified the social status of the person it belonged to.
An
Impressive
Feast
About 1400 BCE
The ancient Egyptians were unmatched maximalists, believing their society was perpetuated by ever surpassing their own prior achievements. Words recited to the deceased called for bread, beer, oxen, and fowl (or “bread, beer, beef, birds,” if you’re trying to be cute); for kings, this could scale up to a thousand bread, a thousand beer, and so on. Throughout 3,000 years of Egyptian history, this abundant afterlife is depicted in tombs and on mortuary stelae as towering offering tables of poultry, bunches of onions, loaves of bread, clusters of grapes, and legs of cattle, often with the deceased seated before it.
Eat Like An Egyptian
To a modern viewer, offering tables look like giant heaps of food. Because of a shift in perspective that’s typical in Egyptian art, these tables probxably depict a top-down view rendered facing the viewer, so all the details of the food and drink were visible, and could be magically activated. Ultimately, that’s what they’re meant to represent: food for the deceased. A lot of it. Forever.
1640s
Excess in Still Life
Dutch stilleven, or still lives, are the root of more is more: Food heaped upon food — not just a lot of it but many kinds — has become the signifier of culinary excess. The “visual feast” concept is cliche but accurate here: A monstrous lobster overflows a platter, its claw hanging over crabs and crevettes. A broken-open meat pie sits in the shadow of a nautilus cup as filling spills from its elaborate crust. Only concentrated study reveals the full variety of foods here — plus there’s a monkey, a parrot, and a lapdog, because why not?
Like Egyptian offering scenes, still lives invoke the specter of death. Yet the meaning of these Golden Age paintings isn’t about provisioning the deceased: It’s a vanitas, or memento mori, for the living. After the Reformation in the Protestant Low Countries, religious imagery became subtler. The abundance in these scenes testifies to the growing wealth of the merchant class — and the breadth of orgiastic new fancies flowing into Europe as it began to reach across the globe. But the food and flowers in these scenes are fleeting; ultimately consumed or rotted, life’s pleasures pale in comparison to those in the next.
1960s
The conceit of pop art is drawing out and exaggerating the recognizable — maximizing it, essentially. Oldenburg started selling human-scaled food sculptures out of his downtown New York installation The Store in the early 1960s. Eventually, he was constructing larger-than-life burgers, apple cores, spoons with cherries, ice cream, and a stacked BLT — the latter pre-nostalgic caricature of midcentury U.S. diner culture.
Pop Goes the Burger
Pop Goes the Burger
1970s
Ladies Night
So large it takes up serious real estate in the Brooklyn Museum’s regrettably named Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Judy Chicago’s seminal installation The Dinner Party offers settings for 39 notable historical and legendary women — with the names of others inscribed around the table, it commemorates more than 1,000. Settings are customized for named guests: Emily Dickinson’s is lacy; Georgia O’Keefe’s, floral; Hildegard de Bingen’s, like medieval stained glass.
The dominating motif, however, is genital; the triangular table, labial folds in the ceramic plates, and even the cowrie shells dangling from the setting for the Primordial Goddess unsubtly mime the shape of a vulva.
The work’s sheer volume as a conceptual banquet for figures overlooked in the canon of cultural history was a feminist milestone. If dining is a political tool, then who gets a seat at the table is a potent metaphor. What if there were only seats for women, and so many of them?
The costumes of Machine Dazzle — especially for Taylor Mac’s performance cycle A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, which elapsed over a full day — use hats shaped like birthday cake, Champagne-cork wigs, and skirts of shredded potato chip bags to retell U.S. history through a queer maximalist lens. The point of this outre approach to what’s often a staid slog through names and dates is best represented in a dress that represents the Civil War era by remaking the crinoline as a cage of barbed-wire hot dogs, its front strewn with red and yellow yarn as if dripping in ketchup and mustard. The headdress, naturally, is a pile of hot dogs in their buns. Machine Dazzle read that German immigrants began selling hot dog precursors around the same time, and that despite the war, national divisions could be healed by “eat[ing] away” at them — an idea so naive, it’s tragically ludicrous.
2010s
to ??
Wear Your Food
An
Impressive
Feast
Rachel P. Kreiter would like to remind the reader that merely writing about art does not constitute an endorsement.
Copy edited by Leilah Bernstein
By Rachel P. Kreiter
The Metropolitan Museum of Art/public domain
North Side of the West Wall of Nakht's Offering Chapel;
The Metropolitan Museum of Art/public domain
Floor Burger, Claes Oldenburg / Getty images
Banquet Still Life, Adriaen van Utrecht/Public domain
The Dinner Party, Judy ChicagO / Getty images
1856-1866 Costume Design by Machine Dazzle for Taylor MacGregory Kramer © Pomegranate Arts/HBO
The Metropolitan Museum of Art/public domain
North Side of the West Wall of Nakht's Offering Chapel; The Metropolitan Museum of Art/public domain
nautilus cup; National
gallery of Art
Banquet Still Life, Adriaen van Utrecht; Adriaen van Utrecht/ Public domain
National gallery of Art
Floor Burger, Claes Oldenburg / Getty images
The Dinner Party, Judy ChicagO / Getty images
