Still Life in Watercolors

eath rather than the final, crystallized form of it—and how he sought to have
each—color and line, line and color—continually exchange places with the other.
As with Still Life with Blue Pot, so with Still Life with Carafe/Bottle, and Fruit:
the white ground of the sheet of drawing paper remains visible and is used to represent
both itself, the support surface, and the object surfaces within the still-life
arrangement. Here it is the paper label of the bottle that the white of the paper sheet
represents: which is to say, the uppermost surface is represented by the undermost
surface—paper glued on top of the glass of the bottle is represented by the paper
underneath the whole arrangement. At the same time, the white of the paper surrounds
and frames the arrangement, constitutes its literal materiality, and interacts
with pencil and watercolor to produce its subject, which is at once the still-life
objects and the process of representing them, at once the volumes and "culminating
points" of bottles and fruit and the site of transformation of paper into glass, water
into wine, graphite and pigment into vessel and flesh. In this sense as well Still Life
with Carafe, Bottle, and Fruit addresses the process and materials of its medium. In
this sense as well it shares its attitude toward drawing and watercoloring with the
Getty still life while standing at the other end of the range of coverage and completion
found overall in Cezanne's late watercolor work.
Whereas Still Life with Blue Pot is so unusual in its covering of almost all of
the sheet of paper with watercolor and its buildup of pigment at the center so that
most of its pencil is finally under cover of color, Still Life with Carafe, Bottle, and
Fruit allows its paper and its pencil to show through and through, everywhere, again
with the exception of the wine bottle at the center, so that no matter which technically
came first and last, the line of graphite or the touch of color, each is seen to
interact with the other as circularly as the curving strokes that grope toward the contours
of the apples at the right over and over again. Up close, and even under the
microscope, it is impossible to tell whether the gray sparkle of graphite dust sits atop
the watery stain of color that has sunk into the weave of the paper because it was
laid down last, or only because its dry materiality and method of application allow it
to float to the top. No matter, Cezanne made sure to leave both visible, so that he and
we could see the dialogue between them for ourselves.
The same dialogue takes place in Still Life with Blue Pot, except that for once
Cezanne chose to work his composition in the manner of a grand old oil painting,
going over it laboriously until it had, if not the method, then the look, when he stood
back (as do we), of a finished masterpiece. But it was a masterpiece, a still life with
the breadth and grandeur of a monumental landscape, that inverted the old relationship
between its opening lines and its final glazes, for it began with its most transparent
washes and ended with its most opaque blue lines, going over the tangled
pencil submerged beneath, now all but invisible except here and there, where a
thread of graphite emerges, like the end of a skein of yarn left dangling to be picked
up and followed into the heart of the maze. For all of its air of finish, then, Still Life
with Blue Pot is all of a piece with Cezanne's late still-life work in watercolor, such as
Still Life with Carafe, Bottle, and Fruit, in which the studio was repeatedly the site of
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PENCIL LINES AND WATERCOLORS