Still Life in Watercolors

Detail 13
the upper left we find straight structuring
lines that indicate a heavy horizontal fold and
the vicinity of the curved edge and fall of the
heaped tapestry. The dimmest of lines are to
be found beneath the layered blue of the
eponymous blue pot—thin veins of graphite
mined from within a sediment ofcobaltlike
blue so thick as to become almost opaque
(detail 11): perhaps the blue pot was the first
thing to be roughed in. A repeated curve—
almost all of Cezanne's outlines are reiterated
several times over, in pencil and later in
watercolor, thus undercutting in one of
several ways the long-standing opposition
between line and color—runs from the second
lump of apple on the right to the apple
behind the white pot, forming both the edge
of a small hillock of tapestry and a large
span within which several smaller arcs are
embraced (detail 12). Those several lines also
mark hesitations and changes of mind—about
the size and number of apples, for instance,
as well as the relation of apples one, two,
and three to tapestry—and those pentimenti
are allowed to show through to become an
integral part of the final work.
Other hesitations and changes of mind
are evident to the naked eye as it searches
amid the morass ofwatercolor hemming
in the open area of white at the center: in the
pitcher handle, in the third apple from the
left, in the white pot It is in the latter especially
that we see repeated loops delineating
the right contour, the handle, and especially
the lid and left contour: there several lines
swing through the interstitial tapestry between
the pitcher handle and the little pot,
until they hit the blue-veiled left edge of that
pot (detail 13). In his later years Cezanne was
never content with a single outline for any
one object, and this little patch between two
objects is an excellent example of that discontent.
It is as if he wished to make objects
and the spaces between them vibrate, and
to make those in-between regions count as
materially existent zones— not empty "negative"
space, neither flat nor neutral, but an
undulant fabric that catches the greater densities
of objects within it, pushing and pulling
at them, creating them out of and reabsorbing
them into its own material weave. It is
also as if he wanted to rehearse the gestures,
the eye-hand intersections, the very process
of constituting objects in space through
drawing repeatedly, gradually ascertaining
and firming up their edges yet at the same
time constantly putting them in doubt,
coming to a resolution through a process of
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PENCIL LINES AND WATERCOLORS