Still Life in Watercolors

I F STILL LIFE WITH BLUE POT is UNUSUAL in its many-layered, multicolored
complexity and labor-intensiveness and in the way most of its pencil disappears
beneath its color work, it is typical of the late watercolors in all genres in its
highlighting of its own means ; method, and medium; its antilinearity and openendedness
of process; and its questioning of the concept of finish, the opposition
between line and color, and the old distinction between intention and execution. There
are other still lifes in pencil and watercolor from the late period, when Cezanne had
moved into his studio at Les Lauves, that are highly worked and densely colored. But
none combines monumental composition with complexity of color effect in quite the
way that Still Life with Blue Pot does, not even the still life that is closest to it in subject
matter (fig. 3). 6 And most are much more etude-like in their compositions, they
are thinner and more transparent in their layerings, and thus their reiterated pencil
lines are more evident and the interaction between graphite and watercolor more
directly available to the eye. Nevertheless, the Getty still life partakes of the late project
of probing the very process of "realization" that so preoccupied its author both indoors
and out. Usually this has been understood as a struggle with the open-air landscape
motif in the weightier medium of oil on canvas. But it was more delicately and selfreflexively
rehearsed in the studio domain of the still life and the sketch-suited, seethrough
medium of watercolor and pencil on paper.
A trajectory may be traced from Cezanne's early and middle years to the last
half-decade of his life in these regards. Most of his still lifes in watercolor date from
the latter period, perhaps because he was ailing and more housebound than theretofore
and so probably spent more time in his atelier, working between his large canvases
of nudes and his smaller watercolors of studio objects—between what have so
often been considered the greatest and the least of his works, the human body in oil
and the "colored drawing" of the nature morte. There are only a few such experiments
in the 18705, a period during which he produced very little in the way of still life in
any medium and few watercolors of any subject. The i88os and 18905 mark the real
beginning of his watercolor practice in this domain, but though there is the beginning
of a watercolor efflorescence in the outdoor study, his watercolors of still objects
indoors remained relatively sparse and consistent in their method during these
years. It was not until after he had built the Les Lauves studio and moved into it in
1902 that his still-life practice in this medium really took off. And then, in an oscillation
between the minimally and the richly worked that characterized his outdoor
production as well, his studio still lifes began to show off the new method that had
developed in his outdoor watercolors, with their attention to air as a palpable medium,
their seeking after effects of shimmer, prismatic light, foliate vibration, and the
translucent overlapping of leaves; and their exposed use of pencil, not only for
underdrawing and contour definition and reinforcement but also to vie with color,
122
CEZANNE IN THE STUDIO