The Bread is the Life

Many artists have used the humble loaf of bread to speak of survival, cultural identity, transcendent spirit…

Bread has appeared in art ever since the agrarian civilisations which relied upon grain as a staple food have existed. There is an Egyptian hieroglyph, a simple semi-circle, that depicts bread, and this symbol went on to have a variety of meanings — feminine, offering — depending on context. Bread’s importance for survival meant it also symbolised spiritual sustenance, especially in Christian services re-enacting the last supper.

The last supper itself has been the subject of countless artists, most notably Leonardo da Vinci who produced his famous fifteenth-century fresco for a convent in Milan, and Salvador Dali, who painted a mystical interpretation of the Sacrament of the Last Supper in 1955, inspired by the Renaissance masters and its metaphysical themes, which has since became one of his most popular and reproduced images. But Dali also produced powerful paintings of bread itself, referencing an established heritage in art history.

In the sixteenth century, the Dutch Masters had devoted their skills to many still lifes of food, which emphasised the opulence and exotic goods their rich patrons could enjoy — lobsters, citrus fruits, game. Among those Enlightenment artists, Johannes Vermeer, chose to paint more humble fare such as milk and bread, images that emphasised the nobility of everyday life. For example, Vermeer’s 1658 painting of The Milkmaid, pouring milk from a simple earthenware pitcher, used what was then the most expensive pigment of blue, ground from lapis lazuli, more often reserved for the gown of the Madonna. A simple basket containing a loaf of bread, and pieces of bread, are placed beside the bowl of milk on the table.

Salvador Dali, who studied art formally in Madrid, copied many of these Dutch masters, particularly Vermeer and the Spanish painter, Diego Velázquez, who was also known to place simple loaves of bread to the fore in several of his paintings of everyday folk such as farmers and minstrels. Dali’s technical skill grew to match these masters, which is evidenced in his 1926 oil on canvas painting of The Basket of Bread. He took four months to complete the painting, which lovingly shows slices of bread, one bitten into, in a simple basket balanced on crumpled white linen arranged on a table. Dali was obsessed with the image of bread for a variety of reasons — he saw it as esoteric, transformative, on the point of dematerialisation into something spiritual, and returned to its symbolism throughout his life.

By the 1930s he’d developed his famously deep symbolism that aligned him with Surrealism and, in 1932, his painting of Anthropomorphic Bread showed a baguette ‘French loaf’, swaddled in its simple wrapping, suggestive of a white stocking, with the loaf top peeping out, like the head of a new-born child. The strong textures and colours of the background — divided to resemble the border between territories on a map — seem to intimidate the baguette-child, like the gathering clouds of war amidst the economic depression of the time, threatening this simple pleasure and necessity of life.

Later in his career, Dali returned to a realistic depiction of bread, painting a simple heel of bread in a basket with the same loving and meticulous detail of his 1926 painting. This 1945 version was painted in California, away from war-torn Europe. The basket of bread is given a stark black background and it is poised at the edge of the wooden table, which gives precarious dynamism and strength to the image. Dali called this painting Basket of Bread, Rather Death than Shame, perhaps as tribute to the Catalan people who had struggled through civil war and the Second World War to retain their roots, and perhaps referring to the choices facing those surviving war.

It was painted over two months as the drama of World War Two drew to a close. Dali himself said he finished it a day before the war ended, and worked on it as Hitler committed suicide in his bunker and the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. ‘My object was to arrive at the immobility of the pre-explosive object’, he later revealed, and on another occasion remarked this painting was ‘the most esoteric and most surrealist of anything that I have painted to date.’ It is said he carried the painting with him whenever he travelled.

It was exhibited at a gallery in New York late 1945 and the painting was reproduced in The Week, a Sunday magazine reaching an audience of 15 million, becoming one of the earliest fine art images to be made available through the mass media. It became a symbol of the Marshall Plan, the European recovery program which rebuilt the agricultural infrastructure of post war Europe, from 1947 to 1951.

Dali also produced many sculptures involving bread and used a repeated bread motif to decorate the walls of the museum he created to house his works in Figueres, Spain. Fittingly, the façades are crowned with rows of giant eggs, representing potential, the promise of rebirth, and of course the extra ingredient that can turn humble bread flour into a cake mix…

Other artists, from Giuseppe Arcimboldo to Carl Warner, have used bread as an medium to explore diverse themes ranging from sustenance, survival, cultural identity, and esoteric ritual. Notably, Marc Quinn produced a variety of bread sculptures in the late 1980s, including portrait busts of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, both produced in 1989, and the following year, the optimistic tutor in Voltaire’s Candide, Dr Pangloss. He also used bread to model his own hand multiple times in the artworks, May to September 1991 and 24 hours, 1st June 1996. The alchemy of flour, yeast, and water was applied to a metal armature and fired in a kiln, the resultant instability of the medium which can change, distort, and perish, reflects the changing identity of the artist, raising themes of transformative biological processes and the transience of flesh.

Grain remains just as important today, with vast swathes of agricultural land given over to its production. As we evolve to cope with climate change, we need to re-address how to grow and distribute staples such as wheat and other mass-cultivated grains, so that humanity can support eight billion people despite war and drought. Scientists suggest that supplementing wheat flour with bean flour may provide more nutrients in our daily bread, and artists will continue to nourish creativity, providing works in response to the humble ‘bread of life’.

* All images are used with license, or presented here for educational purposes under fair usage policy.