Still Life in Watercolors

SOME OF CEZANNE'S WATERCOLOR STILL LIFES are very clearly tableaux, for
the same reasons that the Getty watercolor is. Such is the case of late works
such as the still life on a sideboard just mentioned, Bottles, Pot, Alcohol Stove, and
Apples (fig. 16), and Still Life with Apples and Chair Back (pi. 8). Three Skulls (pi. 9)
and some of the related works of the same subject with one or two skulls look like
completed compositions, though there are related works in oil. The status of other
late watercolor still lifes is less clear, partly because, although they are complex, oneoff
works, their quality of nonfinito is more pronounced. Those include Still Life with
Apples, Pears, and a Pot, Still Life with Cut Watermelon, The Dessert, Still Life with
Blue Pot and Bottle of Wine, Still Life with Fruit, Carafe, Sugar Bowl, and Bottle, and
Still Life with Green Melon (fig. 15; pis. 6, 8; fig. 40; pis. 18,19).
It is in still-life studies like these that Cézanne must have come to understand
the concept of the tableau non fini, the unfinished picture whose unfinish was a sign
not of an incomplete linear procedure, of an idea not fully realized, but rather of a
new conception of the picture and, along with it, a fundamentally revised process
toward it. It was here too that he must have begun to understand the possibility of
transforming the study proceedings of the studio into the notion of the variation on
the study theme. Cezanne's variations on a theme were related to but also fundamentally
unlike the Impressionist series: namely, the temporal, optical, or gestural series
in which Monet and Degas in their different ways began to specialize, in which the
time, light and palette, and/or the motion of the body changed the look of the same
motif. The Impressionist notion of the series was an essentially photographic or cinematic
conception, in which the series as a whole rather than individual parts of it
eventually became the work of art.
Cezanne's variations were otherwise: in them the processes of the studio
were studied from one picture to the next; no temporal, optical, or gestural change
motivated the movement from one to the other; none was part of a larger whole.
Instead, each represented a world unto itself that incorporated into itself temporal,
optical, and gestural changes, and within them the only movement that occurred was
the movement in the studio, in the picture itself, and in the eye and body of the
draftsman as he drew, of the painter as he painted, and then of the viewers as they
view. That is to say, objects were moved and reordered, brought in or left out, put in
different parts of the studio; the artist's eye and hand then moved around the space
of the picture and the objects within it, drawing and redrawing, painting and repainting
them, and then the viewer is asked to do the same, vicariously. Each picture
was a rehearsing of the time, optical space, and gestures of the studio. And each picture
was a testing ground for pushing at the boundary between study and picture,
and determining where and when to begin and where and when to finish—since
there was no longer a predetermined place to start and to stop, as there had been in
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CÉZANNE IN THE STUDIO