Still Life in Watercolors

Detail 27 >
Detail 26
red, one building the translucency of the
other into a density that begins to approach
opacity. Next to it we can see how a loaded
C-curve ofocheris built on top of a dilute
ocher with veils of pale green and lavender
beneath, topped off by dense Prussian blue
contour strokes above. Above those two
interlocked shapes we can see how green
under blue layered with a touch of red produces
a variegated blue ranging from sky
and cornflower to lavender. Above that and
slightly to the left, the maze of marks and
colors becomes more complicated, and the
figurative basis of the color layers is increasingly
buried: an orange is made of red built
on top of yellow, lying next to a green that is
glimpsed through blue and eggplant next
to layers of ocher, next to veils of ocher, wine,
and blue. Commas of blue, dark red, and
black finish it all off—again, line completes
color as much as the other way around.
Again, figuration lies buried beneath kaleidoscopic
color.
In the heap of tapestry in the upper left,
the complication just described is acute and
almost indescribable. Here the large dividing
lines of the gold banding within the tapestry
provide the gross indication of surface design
and the only road map to its pattern; they
also suggest a kind of structuring armature
within which color runs riot. And here the
heaping of the tapestry into a massive, almost
geological fold that seems heaviest just
above the bent horizontal of the gold banding
accrues out of the dense, lapidary accretion
of color marks one on top of another, with
some aeration by white, as if it were literally
the amassing of pigment layers that accounts
for the amassing of the material weight
of the fabric. Or is it that the folding of color
upon color to the point that its figurative
underpinning is lost to sight was suggested by
the folding of the fabric over itself upon the
studio table? The morass of colors both next
to and beneath and over one another is undecidable,
literally stunning in its effect of
rainbow hue and peacock splendor—all we
can do is inventory its oranges, reds, ochers,
greens, bl'ues, and purples, and guess at
which lies under and over which (sometimes
one and sometimes the other—for instance,
a green lies under blue and purple in one
place, and seems to lie over them in another);
the order is never fixed (detail 26). The layering
is densest at the very center of that
mountain of tapestry, where the two bands of
gold intersect and lose their way, and where
the edges of a multitude of once-watery
color patches crowd ten- and twenty fold.
At the inner edge of that heap, where those
colors array themselves at the limit of the
-bare-paper area of white, they pile atop
a buried line of graphite, dense blue atop
maroon atop green, probably atop an underlayer
of paler blue. There density of pigment
confronts absence of pigment in a kind of
meeting of opposed forces. Meanwhile the
upper-left contour of the heap of fabric is
gone over in broken, repeated threads of red,
ocher, blue, and maroon, while interior folds
are reinforced by blue, maroon, and black
commas, dashes, and S-marks (detail 24).
Below, where the fabric falls on the left,
there is one final confrontation between the
figurative use of color and a dense color layering
that suggests abstraction—the gothic
fold of tapestry layered with blue and violet
that lies between lobed and outlined shapes
of gold, green, and red, clearly evoking the
fruit and flowers of the tapestry design
(detail 2j). Here Cezanne worked his colors
almost too heavily, for the greens, yellows,
and wines that lie below the blue and milky
violet begin to grow muddy, and the reinforcement
by blue—everywhere blue—red,
and black lines begins to acquire the look and
feel of an unwanted pentimento—an effort
to correct that began to go too far. Pull back,
however, and it has the advantage of weighting
the sheet, balancing the vivid blue note
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CEZANNE IN THE STUDIO