page_title: Tobacco and art
section_title: 18th century to 21st century
hierarchical_section_title: Tobacco and art / 18th century to 21st century
context_page_description: Depictions of tobacco smoking in art date back at least to the pre-Columbian Maya civilization, where smoking had religious significance. The motif occurred frequently in painting of the 17th-century Dutch Golden Age, in which people of lower social class were often shown smoking pipes. In European art of the 18th and 19th centuries, the social location of people – largely men – shown as smoking tended to vary, but the stigma attached to women who adopted the habit was reflected in some artworks. Art of the 20th century often used the cigar as a status symbol, and parodied images from tobacco advertising, especially of women. Developing health concerns around tobacco smoking also influenced its artistic representation. Recently tobacco has impacted on art in a quite different way, with the conversion of many cigarette vending machines into Art-o-mat outlets, selling miniature artworks the shape and size of a cigarette packet.
context_section_description: Following the Golden Age, tobacco usage in artwork lost prominence. The decline of smoking representations is most likely due to the influence of Rococo age elegance, which made snuff the preferred choice. Though snuff usage increased, snuff portrayals never became as common as those of cigars, cigarettes, and pipes in European paintings. Against norms of the time period, French artist Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, who was inspired by Golden Age artwork, occasionally included pipes in his pieces. One such painting is a still life entitled Smoking Kit with Drinking Pot. The pipe in this piece lacks symbolic meaning.
  In the late 18th century and early 19th century, smoking took on new and varied symbolic meanings. During this time period, men were the primary smokers, and smoking was not an acceptable habit for women who were expected to be ideal mothers or mistresses. In the Romantic period, people believed smoking held a close association with intellectualism. Édouard Manet's Stéphane Mallarmé exemplifies art from this time. The painting shows an upper-class man with a lit cigar in his hand and that same hand resting on top of an open book. His eyes are look into the distance seeming to be deep in thought. Benno Tempel (curator of the Kunsthal, Rotterdam) argues that smoking in this painting symbolizes a modern lifestyle even though smoking had been around for centuries.
  The impressionists painted scenes of everyday life that included cigars, cigarettes, or pipes, but they did not put symbolic importance in them. The post-impressionists returned symbolic meaning to smoking instruments. One notable painting was done by Vincent van Gogh called Skull with a Burning Cigarette. Although this painting seems to be an anti-smoking warning, it was actually representative of the black humor and practical jokes popular during that time. Edvard Munch launched this trend with his painting Self-Portrait. It shows the artist with a cigarette against a dark background and an eerie look across his face. Munch used smoke to symbolize psychological problems.
  By the 20th century, cigarettes, cigars, and pipes all had their own specific meanings and connotations that developed across history. By playing off these meanings, artists conveyed a fuller understanding of an artwork to the viewer. For example, the cigar came to represent a social status symbol, and artists included cigars in paintings to show emphasize social classes and power differences. Heinrich Maria Davringhausen’s The Black Marketeer depicts a boss with a boxful of cigars and a lit one at the edge of his desk. This demonstrates the unequal social relationship between the employer and the employee. Pablo Picasso also used the pipe in his piece called The Poet. This painting relies on the inseparable connection between literature and the pipe to provide the viewer with a better understanding of the painting.
caption: Édouard Manet's Portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé
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