power flowers; Who said still life was dead.

Byline: Dodie Kazanjian

The still life, a work of art depicting inanimate objects, did not emerge as an independent art form until the sixteenth century. Ever since Caravaggio and the seventeenth-century Dutch masters, though, it has served as a primary subject for major artists as diverse as Chardin, Goya, Manet, Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso. Although the tradition survives in the work of Warhol, Lichtenstein, Koons, and a few others, most contemporary artists have had little use for it. Vogue, which has investigated two other seemingly outdated art genres in recent years-the self-portrait (2003) and the nude (2005)-has now challenged some of our most innovative talents to reactivate the still life. The ground rules were simple: fruit or flowers, or both, interpreted any way the artists saw fit.

Some of them complained, and a few were quite grumpy. Why fruit and flowers? Chuck Close wanted to do a skull, "the ultimate still life," as he put it, and a de rigueur element in all those vanitas paintings that remind us of our short time on Earth. But in the end, he gave us a daguerreotype portrait of a sunflower-a powerful image that has been woven into an eight-foot-tall tapestry. (The tapestry, along with all the works shown here and many more, is on view at New York's Paula Cooper Gallery through June 8.) The only one who really bent the rules was Maurizio Cattelan, with ...