Still Life in Watercolors

Figure 45 >
St/7/ Life with Blue Pot (pl.i)
with blues separated out
thickening into translucency, instead of the
reverse. It signposts the stain of rose that
spreads onto the upper arc of the handle and
the faint, crisscrossing lines of graphite
that emerge from beneath it and trail onto
the downward trend of the outer part of the
handle. And it competes with the thick
black line that Cezanne applied, also toward
the end, to reinforce the inner contour
of the opening made by the pitcher's handle.
Cezanne could have stopped before adding
that touch of green, but he did not. He could
have added further touches of green here
and there after the one that drifts from the
body to the handle of the pitcher, but he
didn't. He stopped just there; he must have
felt that it was just right, or as close to it as
he was going to get.
Inspired by Cezanne filtered through
Chard in, Rilke remarked that he wanted
to write a "history of blue. " l And others remarked
on the blue drawing that is found
everywhere in the composition, reinforcing
the contours of the objects at the center,
overlaying their underlying graphite with
Prussian blue, as if to bring the underdrawing
to the surface (fig. 45). When he saw the
show atAmbroise Vollard's gallery in 1905,
Maurice Denis remarked that the watercolors
were "built out of vibrant contrasts on preparatory
washes of Prussian blue; the definitive
color of these sketches, as composed
and constructed as pictures, has been raised
to a powerful and admirable resonance. One
would have said they were ancient faiences." 2
Denis might have added that the blue also lay
over both the "preparatory washes" and the
"vibrant contrasts" as a finalizing, reinforcing
armature, a kind of bright exoskeleton,
drawing made of color on top of color upon
color, on top of drawing made of graphite.
But he did understand the importance of
blue—it provided the keynote and, in this
particular watercolor, the central blue object.
Denis also saw that these "sketches" were
"pictures"—none more so than this one—
and like others he felt that there was something
ceramic (and Provencal) about them—
again, none more than Still Life with Blue
Pot, with its overall Provencal palette and its
porcelain pitcher, made of white paper,
blue marks, hints of rose, touch of green, and
reinforcing black and blue.
Andre Fontainas, for one, spoke of the
effect of "paintedporcelain"produced by the
watercolors. He too spoke of the overlay
of colors: "The master amuses himself. But his
diversions are wondrous marvels and beautifully
instructive. They make play with bold
blues, pure whites, clear yellows ... and
they sometimes give the illusion of painted
porcelain, of delicate, iridescent opals.
Others, with only a few touches of color, are
admirable drawings. " 3 Pointing to the oscillation
between drawing and color, the bare
minimum and the spectacular deployment of
brilliant primary colors, with "bold blues"
leading the way, Fontainas obviously delighted
in the lightness of the watercolors and nevertheless
took them seriously; he found them
"instructive." In 7907 Rilke loved the lightness
of the watercolors too; he wrote in a letter
that he had seen the show at Bernheim-Jeune
and had found the watercolors "extremely
beautiful. They are just as assured as the
paintings, and as insubstantial as the paintings
are solid.... Very faint pencil outlines,
upon which only here and there, almost as
emphasis and confirmation, an accidental bit
of color falls, a row of spots of pigments
wonderfully arranged and as sure in their
touch as if they were reflecting a melody." 4
Perhaps that green touch on the white pitcher
in Still Life with Blue Pot was one of those
final "accidental bit[s] of color" that became
an "emphasis" and a "confirmation."
Others, such as Robert Delaunay, saw
the "colored planes" of the watercolors as
the "precursor... of Cubism." 5 But though all
those that loved the watercolors clearly took
them seriously, perhaps more seriously than
Cezanne himself intended them, they tended
to emphasize, not their avant-gardism, but
their delicacy, their airy insubstantiality, their
play with process. 6 Indeed, it was Cezanne's
young admirer Emile Bernard, most immediately
responsible for crafting Cezanne's
mythic status as the old man of modernism,
who described his watercolor process, having
seen him execute a landscape in the medium:
"His method was remarkable, totally different
from traditional procedures and extremely
complicated. He began with a single patch,
which he then overlapped with a second, and
a third, until these patches, which produced
screens, modeled the object by means of
color." 7 According to Bernard, Cezanne
began with "a patch": did he also end with a
patch—of a different color than the one with
which he began? It seems likely—though
where the graphite drawing fits in is uncertain
in this account. And what significance a
green had in relation to all the blue—this
time a milligram instead of a kilo of green—
well, that is for us to determine.
This watercolor, of course, is a still life,
not a landscape, and so its air of "faience"
i 3 8
CEZANNE IN THE STUDIO