Still Life in Watercolors

Detail 29 >
struck by the blue pot that gives the still
life its name, and offsetting the volumetric
drama of the centerpiece of blue pot,
pitcher, white pot, and apples atop an apparently
brilliant white cloth.
And here ends our archaeological journey
through the still life, our excavation of its
site of drawing and watercolor, at the place
where the composition began and where the
finishing touches are most evident Here
color—red and gold for the apples, blue and
white for the vessels—is used representationally.
The veiling of dark red and ocher in
the apples works much the same as elsewhere
in the still life, except that here it
rounds and models the forms of the fruit and
denotes the colored flesh of their surf aces.
White shows through—with a squiggle of
red-brown in the leftmost apple (detail 28),
with traces of graphite visible in the third
apple from the left—but it shows through to
provide highlights and "culminating points":
those volumetric prominences that were so
crucial for Cezanne, reversing perspectival
diminution and vanishing-point convergence
and organizing space around multiple nodes.
White paper makes the porcelain of the
pitcher and the enamel of the white pot,
while repeated blue with a bit of purplish red
and a touch of green provides a hint of patterning
on the former and the modeling
of the latter, as well as the multiple curving
lines of its metal swing handle. Blue upon
blue upon blue and violet forms the blue pot,
which has almost no free white in it; instead,
its highlight/"culminating point" is made
out of a pale wash of blue glimpsed through
thickened, opaque layers of richer, darker
blue (detail 29]; instead, one looks through
blue to see more blue, and slightly different
shades of blue. Finishing it all off are the blue
and black and violet—and sometimes red—
but mostly blue reinforcing lines that repeatedly
demarcate the contours and the interstices
between objects, causing them to
resonate, vibrate, and hover between line
and color, growing the two together. As we
watch, the still life comes into being "out
of the blue" and goes on coming into being
constantly, forever, on the studio table,
on the sheet of paper, before our eyes, under
Cezanne's imagined pencil and brush.
Detail 28
12O
CEZANNE IN THE STUDIO