Still life may be the most prosaic genre of painting. A few common objects, usually arranged on a tabletop, are all it comprises. How could it be poetic? But look at a Manet vase of flowers or a Morandi grouping of bottles and you have your answer.

Not everything in this large and diverse group show lives up to the ideal of the title. But in this postmodern era, the definition of poetry is elastic enough to encompass everything from the quotidian to the transcendent.

…It may be easy to write an ode on a Grecian urn, but it is no mean feat to wax poetic over a few skeletal flowers in a chalky vase, as Barbara Goodstein does in “Asymmetrical Arrangement.”