Objects

Within the long history of Western art, objects have moved from serving as attributes of saints or personifications to acting as dense, material nodes in the representation of modern experience. In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century painting especially, seemingly prosaic things—beer glasses, branded bottles, gilt clocks, parasols, or an overturned picnic basket—no longer simply decorate the scene; they organize social relations, mediate gazes, and register shifting conceptions of time, labor, and desire. The “Objects” symbolism category thus marks a decisive art-historical turn: from stable iconographic codes to a semiotics grounded in commodity culture, urban leisure, and reflexive looking.

The semiotic force of objects is particularly legible in Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), which constructs the entire encounter through things arranged on a marble counter. Branded bottles—most notably the Bass ale with its red triangle—and the chilled champagne establish the bar as a node in globalized consumer culture; their labels function as corporate signatures, promising standardized pleasure. The “branded bottles” here are not neutral still-life props but emblems of commercial spectacle, aligning the barmaid with the goods she sells. The “beer glass” and “carafe and glasses on the table” extend this logic: vessels of café sociability that point to the bar as a site where intoxication is both a product and a cost of urban nightlife. A “bowl of oranges”—a compact unit of chromatic warmth and “tangible currency of desire”—crowns this array, echoing period associations of oranges in glass compotes with sexual commerce. In Manet’s bar, then, objects articulate an economy of looking: they translate diffuse desire into purchasable units while the “mirror” behind Suzon fractures spatial logic, foregrounding the constructedness of this exchange.

If Manet’s counter dramatizes modern spectacle, his earlier Luncheon on the Grass (1863) mobilizes picnic objects to expose the mechanics of bourgeois leisure. The “overturned picnic basket with fruit and bread” operates as an emblem of appetite and consumption, its spillage paralleling the nude’s availability to the male gaze. Devoid of mythic alibi, this basket links bodily desire to material pleasures in the most literal way. Unlike the refined, vertical alignment of bottles in the bar scene, this rustic ensemble is toppled, underlining the abrupt collision between classical quotation and contemporary moeurs. The basket’s placement in the immediate foreground insists that the viewer, too, stands on the same grass, sharing the men’s vantage and being implicated in their consumption.

In Olympia (1863), Manet tightens this economy of objects into a set of high-charged tokens. The “bouquet of flowers,” delivered by the Black maid Laure, is at once a conventional sign of admiration and a concrete trace of monetary transaction—gift, condolence, or erotic offer. The “black ribbon choker” and the “single slipper” on the bed become commodity accessories marking Olympia’s modernity: purchasable luxury cinched tightly around the throat and an intimate object alluding to nocturnal commerce. Here, things function iconographically as emblems of a sex-gendered marketplace, but their modern facture and abrupt lighting insist on their status as goods, not allegories. They index the circulation of bodies, money, and race within Parisian modernity as surely as the corporate labels do in the Folies-Bergère bar.

Other Impressionist and post-Impressionist painters retool objects to investigate perception itself. Paul Cézanne’s tabletop worlds—invoked here by reference to The Card Players and the still lifes with apples and oranges—translate apples, oranges, plates, and a “central bottle (axis)” into units of form and color-weight. In The Card Players, “playing cards” and a “dark bottle” are not anecdotal props of rural leisure so much as devices that stabilize attention. The cards signify chance and rule-bound contest, yet their small, rigid rectangles rhyme with the tabletop edge and the barrel of the bottle, helping Cézanne orchestrate a strictly governed equilibrium. The “orange-brown table” itself is theorized as a stage of action, a plane against which human concentration is measured. In the later still lifes, the “tilted basket,” “footed compote,” and “rumpled white cloth” become agents of controlled instability: the objects are semiotically modest but structurally radical, asserting that vision is built through relationships of color and shifting viewpoints rather than fixed perspective. The semiotics of objects here is less narrative than epistemological.

Claude Monet’s practice, by contrast, often employs objects to mediate between human routine and atmospheric flux. In Poppies (1873), the hillside is animated by “red poppies” that function both as seasonal tokens of vitality and as structural color-notes, but the key object is the “blue parasol” carried by the woman who appears twice along the diagonal path. As in Beach at Trouville (1870), where a band of “white parasols” and the “diagonal boardwalk” articulate promenade culture, the parasol symbolizes bourgeois leisure and the mediated encounter with sunlight; it also acts as a pivot in the painting’s chromatic system, a cool accent playing against the field’s hot reds. Parasols here are less attributes of an allegory of Spring than signs of a new regime of public leisure and self-presentation in which clothing and accessories become readable codes of class and behavior.

Monet’s Rouen Cathedral series (1892–94) extends the role of objects into the domain of architectural ornament. The “rose window (glowing orange disc)” becomes a condensed, almost abstract sign of concentrated warmth within a façade otherwise dissolved into “cobalt wallpaper florets” of broken violet and gold. In these canvases the cathedral is less a religious monument than a giant object—an urban thing—pressed into service as a screen for light. The rose window, once a theological diagram, now operates semiotically as a pulsating core of chroma, a surrogate sun at the center of a secular experiment in serial perception.

Within scenes of performance and practice, objects expose the infrastructure behind spectacle. Edgar Degas’s The Ballet Class (1873–76) populates its rehearsal studio with tools of discipline and maintenance: “diagonal floorboards” that read as a conveyor of repeated exercise; a “watering can” in the foreground, the humble implement that dampens the floor to enable dancing; the ballet master’s cane, a “pointing gesture and cane” that codifies authority. The white tutus, with “colored sashes and pink slippers,” index uniformity shot through with minute variations of rank and personality. These things reveal ballet as labor, not fantasy. Similarly, in Degas’s orchestral and rehearsal images referenced by the “double bass” and its variant as “vertical hinge,” the instrument becomes an object that stands for unseen work: a tall, wooden machine that anchors the composition and links the musicians’ discipline to the glitter of the stage.

Mary Cassatt’s The Boating Party (1893–94) offers a parallel rethinking of objects within a gendered space of modern leisure. The “rowboat” and “diagonal oar” form not just setting but argument: the boat is a liminal home on the water, and the oar a vector of propulsion controlled by the male rower yet encircling mother and child. The oar’s emphatic diagonal and the boat’s curved gunwale make visible a negotiation between motion and shelter. Unlike Manet’s bar, where objects mediate commodified encounters, Cassatt’s skiff and its equipment symbolize care in motion—a revaluation of modernity through the lens of relational presence.

Across these works, objects repeatedly mediate between time and experience. The “gilt mantel clock” in Degas’s Bellelli Family (invoked in the symbol entry) epitomizes regulated domestic time and the pressure of order; the “closed hard pocket watch” in Dalí’s Persistence of Memory (cited in the symbol discussion) perversely dramatizes the brittleness of mechanical time by being overrun with ants, especially poignant against the “soft (melting) pocket watches” that figure dream duration. In both cases, the clock-object becomes a metonym of temporal regimes—bourgeois routine in the one, the collapse of rational chronology in the other—thus marking a historical arc from faith in regulated time to its Surrealist unmaking.

What emerges from these examples is a broad reorientation of iconography. The Baroque attribute or medieval emblem gives way to the beer glass, the parasol, the branded bottle, the watering can, or the pocket watch, all drawn from everyday life yet operating as highly coded signs. In Manet, such objects bind modern spectatorship to commodity exchange; in Monet and Cézanne, they test the limits of perception and pictorial structure; in Degas and Cassatt, they disclose the labor and care underpinning performance and leisure. Over the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, objects become both more ordinary and more conceptually charged. They no longer simply illustrate stories, but articulate the very conditions—economic, temporal, and perceptual—within which modern stories can be seen at all.