Still Life in Watercolors

365-72; 394~97)- Cezanne himself clearly read
Baudelaire's writing and expressed his admiration
for it: see letters to his son of September 13
and 28, 1906, in Paul Cezanne, Correspondance
recueillie, annotee et prefacee par John Rewald
(Paris: B. Grasset, 1978), 326, 329.
6. John Rewald, Paul Cezanne: The Watercolors:
A Catalogue Raisonne (Boston: Little, Brown, 1983),
233, fig. 572, believed that there was no pencil work
in the Getty watercolor. (This was the reason he gave
for seeing the Michigan version, in which he saw
the pencil work, as a preliminary effort, and the Still
Life with Blue Pot as the final painting.) Although he
tended to agree with Rewald's proposed sequencing
of the Michigan and Getty drawings, George Goldner,
under whose tenure as drawings curator the J. Paul
Getty Museum acquired the watercolor, understood
Rewald's assumption about the lack of pencil to be
wrong (George R. Goldner, with the assistance of Lee
Hendrix and Gloria Williams, European Drawings i:
Catalogue of the Collections [Malibu, Calif.: J. Paul
Getty Museum, 1988], 150). As Goldner saw, pencil
marks are immediately available to the eye, which
suggests that there are quite a few more to be found
underneath the layers of watercolor. Microscopic
examination and infrared photography confirm this
hunch, leading one to see much more pencil with
the naked eye than the first impression suggests.
7. In addition to being one of three watercolors
shown in the 1877 Impressionist exhibition, this
gouache was bought by one of Cezanne's earliest
patrons, Victor Chocquet.
8. On the importance of Delacroix to Cezanne,
see Vollard, En ecoutant Cezanne, Degas, Renoir,
62-63, m which he recounts Cezanne's admiration
for a watercolor of flowers by Delacroix (1849) on
sale at Victor Chocquet's in the 18905. See also Gotz
Adriani, Cezanne Watercolors, trans. Russell M.
Stockman (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1983), 28ff.
9. Both of these works are in the Pearlman
collection, on long-term loan to Princeton. They are
excellent examples of earlier and later drawing
and watercolor technique that I had many opportunities
to study up close when Laura Giles, a team of
graduate students, and I were working on the 2002
exhibition Cezanne in Focus. They provided an
excellent occasion for microscopic examination as
well, which revealed just how much interplay there
was between pencil and watercolor, and how often
pencil lay on top of watercolor as well as watercolor
on top of pencil. This was my hunch, from having
seen them with the unaided eye, and it was borne out.
10. One watercolor with a balcony, depicting roofs
seen through an open window, probably in Aix,
is found on the verso of the Pearlman Trees Forming
an Arch of 1904-5; another one, titled The Balcony
and dated c. 1900, is located in the Philadelphia
Museum of Art. See Giles and Armstrong, Cezanne
in Focus, 117-20.
11. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenologie de
la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), esp. 3Ooff.;
and the title essay of Merleau-Ponty, L'Oeil et I'esprit
(Paris: Gallimard, 1964). See Jonathan Crary, "1900:
Reinventing Synthesis," in Suspensions of Perception:
Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 280-359, for a view
of Cezanne that is critical of the phenomenological
perspective while also putting it in the historical
context of the vitalist movement of the turn of the
century and the work of Henri Bergson, Edmund
Husserl, and others.
12. For some of the best new thinking on the art of
drawing, see Catherine de Zegher and Avis Newman,
The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act: Selected
from the Tate Collection (New York: Tate Publishing
and the Drawing Center, 2003).
13. "Des qualites definies ne se dessinent dans
la masse confuse des impressions que si elle
est mise en perspective et coordonnee par 1'espace"
(Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 251
[emphasis added]).
14. "Le son et la couleur ... dessinent un objet,
le cendrier, le violon" (ibid., 263 [emphasis added]).
15. "Si je fais passer rapidement un crayon devant
une feuille de papier ou j'ai marque un point de
repere, je n'ai a aucun moment conscience que le
crayon se trouve au-dessus du point de repere, je ne
vois aucune des positions intermediaires et cependant
j'ai 1'experience du mouvement. Recriproquement
si je ralentis le mouvement et que je parvienne
a ne pas perdre de vu le crayon, a ce moment meme
1'impression de mouvement disparait. Le mouvement
disparait au moment meme ou il est le plus
conforme a la definition qu'en donne la pensee
objective. Ainsi on peut obtenir des phenomenes
ou le mobile n'apparait que pris dans le mouvement.
Se mouvoir n'est pas pour lui passer tour a tour
par une serie indefinie de positions, il n'est donne
que commen^ant, poursuivant ou achevant son
mouvement" (ibid., 312).
16. See James Elkins, What Painting Is (New York
and London: Routledge, 1999), on the alchemical history
of color in oil painting.
135
PENCIL LINES AND WATERCOLORS