Still Life in Watercolors

a fundamental rethinking of the structure of artistic work and pictorial thought, and
of the relationship between drawing and painting, dessin and colons.
That site was an experimental space, in which objects could be counted on to
stay still, could be arranged and rearranged at will, could recapitulate the atelier of
old that the Impressionists had rejected and make it over into a new kind of working
room, could safely evoke more intimate human spaces and relations while at the
same time setting them quite literally aside. And it was also a control on the experiment
that took place outdoors, a place of refuge, greater ease, and homely familiarity,
in which Promethean struggle could be made over into more modest play, a
grand mission into a more subtle project, and in which the severe and pompous burden
of posterity could be traded in, for a while, for the repeated now of the gesture
of rendering intertwined with the ongoingness of the act of seeing, the haptics of
drawing locked in an embrace with the optics of color, and vice versa. It was something
like an artisanal space remade, in which the making and grouping of the simplest
of Provencal objects could be over and over again analogized to the intertwined
processes of drawing and painting, and vice versa. It was a space in which to learn,
and learn again, how to draw lines and how to touch paint to paper, and in which
order. And now it is a space, on paper, into which we as viewers are invited, and
invited to learn, as never before or since.
NOTES
1. Emile Bernard's inventory of Cezanne's (oil)
palette, in Souvenirs sur Paul Cezanne, et lettres
(Paris: R. G. Michel, 1925), 46, on the occasion
of the two of them painting a still life together that
Cezanne had arranged in a downstairs room of
his Les Lauves studio: "Les Jaunes. / Jaime brillant.—
Jaune de Naples.— Jaime de chrome.— Ocre jaune.—
Terre de Sienne naturelle. / Les Rouges / Vermilion.
—Ocre rouge.—Terre de Sienne brulee.—Laque
de garance.—Laque carminee fine.—Laque brulee. /
Les Verts. / Vert Veronese.—Vert emeraude.—
Terre verte. / Les Bleus. / Bleu de cobalt.— Bleu
d'outremer.—Bleu de prusse.— Noir de peche."
2. On Cezanne's pigments and paper, see Faith
Zieske, "Technical Observations," in Cezanne in
Focus: Watercolors from the Henry and Rose
Pearlmari Collection, ed. Laura M. Giles and Carol
Armstrong (Princeton: Princeton University Art
Museum, 2002), 27-29; and Zieske, "Paul Cezanne's
Watercolors: His Choice of Pigments and Papers,"
in The Broad Spectrum: Studies in the Materials,
Techniques, and Conservation of Color on Paper, ed.
Harriet K. Stratis and Brit Slavesen (London:
Archetype, 2002), 89-100.
3. There is actually some very faint watercolor
wash in the upper-left corner of Still Life with
Blue Pot, so there is less bare paper than apparent
at first glance.
4. See Yve-Alain Bois, "Matisse and 'Arche-
Drawing,'" in Painting as Model (Cambridge and
London: MIT Press, 1990), 36-38: Gauguin attributed
this remark to Cezanne, but Edmond Duranty
also put these words in the mouth of the main
character in his 1867 story "Le Peintre Marsabiel."
Vollard tells the story as a visit by Duranty to
Cezanne's studio, which became disguised as that
of painter "Maillobert," who remarked "qu'un kilogramme
de vert etait plus vert qu'un gramme
de la meme couleur" (Ambroise Vollard, En ecoutant
Cezanne, Degas, Renoir [Paris: Bernard Grasset,
1938], 33)-
5. See Charles Baudelaire, "Salon de 1846: III: De
la couleur" and "Le peintre de la vie moderne" (Le
Figaro, November 26 and 29, and December 3, 1863),
in Curiosites esthetiques, L'Art romantique et autres
oeuvres critiques de Baudelaire, ed. Henri Lemaitre
(Paris: Gamier, 1962), 107-12, 360-404 (esp.
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CEZANNE IN THE STUDIO