Still Life in Watercolors

Detail 14
irresolution while unsettling every act of
object definition. There was no pictorial
product finally free of process for Cezanne in
his late years, no objective world free of
subjective interaction with it, no visual perception
free of imagined tactile apprehension
or the very real physical touching of hand
and pencil to paper: one comes into fragile
being through the other while constantly
verging on dissolution—as if the kinetic state
of matter were all tangled up with the equally
kinetic and equally entangled acts of perception
and delineation.
The pencil lines beneath the light and
darker blues of the white pot lie uncovered
for a moment in two crisscrossing lines in
the free white zone of the pot's lid, between
the two peaked points of left rim and lid tip,
reinforced as they are by blue darkening
to black (detail 14). Those pencil marks, like
the quick X over the red stripe at the right
edge of the linen, are freer and darker than
the others. Such marks call into question
the underdrawing status of the graphite, and
while they provide no certainty as to whether
they were either final or later than the fainter
marks located beneath areas ofwatercolor,
they do propose a different kind of relation
between drawing and painting than the linear
trajectory from initial conception in pencil
to the filling in, layering over, and finishing
off by watercolor: instead of separate layers,
they suggest a threading of pencil through
and through, and a reiterative, intricated,
dialogic relation between graphite lines and
watercolor veils. Such a relation is suggested
as well in the two swoops of pencil left partially
evident in the folds beneath the pitcher,
partly bolstered and partly countermanded
in the parentheses of blue and the veils of
rose laid over it (detail 15). It is suggested
as well in the loose, blunt-pencil scribble
of graphite below and perhaps also over the
fold in the very center of the linen, just below
the second apple from the left. And it is indicated
in the quick swirl of pencil that escapes
from beneath the red stripe to the left.
There are many areas in the watercolor
where no pencil lines at all are to be found,
whether visible or buried beneath color: the
Detail 15
red stripes on the cloth, much of the brightly
colored design of the tapestry, and all of
the wall, including the horizon line of wainscoting,
the double line of molding where the
wall meets the floor, and the two large zones
of wall surface, light and dark, that they
demarcate. Indeed, the archaeology of
Still Life with Blue Pot reveals that whereas
graphite congregates in the center of the
composition, next to a large zone of mostly
empty white paper, it thins out and disappears
toward the perimeter of the work. This
is not to say that the peripheral regions of
the still life were unimportant to Cezanne or
insignificant to the viewer. On the contrary,
they allow fora dialogue between object
composition and free surface that reads as
open space, between densely and thinly
worked areas; they provide relief and breathing
room, encouraging the to-and-fro of
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CEZANNE IN THE STUDIO