Still Life in Watercolors

"handwriting" and the "deformations" of this
particular still life, and in the way that it is
saturated with Cezanne's human peculiarity.
And a bit like Schapiro, I find the bodily
(though not necessarily the sexual) imprint
of Cezanne in the Still Life. At the same time,
again somewhat like Schapiro, I consider it a
kind o/paysage historique, framing its realm
of things as if it had the breadth, human heft,
and space of the old narrative landscape,
as if the human being could wend his way
through it on his life journey, expressing what
heretofore had been the concern of high
history painting and historical landscape in
the up-close, low-life "manualspace,"
as Braque would call it, of still-life painting.
In Cezanne's still-life painting, however,
the human journey is charted, not in ancient
Rome, but on the tabletop, along with the
floors, furnishings, chairs, and walls surrounding
it, not on Mount Olympus but at
the intersection between domestic and studio
life, between the painter's eye and hand. The
space of Still Life with Blue Pot and others of
its genre and medium is a biographical space,
certainly, only not in the high, heroic sense,
nor in the potboiler sense of the torturedartist
romance that Cezanne's friend Emile
Zola made famous with The Masterpiece in
1886, but in this strictly still-life sense:
its rustic objects and the relationships among
them speak intimately and familiarly of
the painter's home away from home in his
Provencal studio, and of the nature of the
relationship between the painter's art and
his life. Thus my story of the Cezanne of Still
Life with Blue Pot will not be the Olympian
myth of modernism with its herculean struggles
and godly genealogies. It will be instead the
more particular, poignant story of the human
gravitas of a still life in watercolors.
Still life is the subject of the first part
of this study. Watercolor is the subject of the
second. So then what is the place of watercolor
in this tale? Cezanne's watercolors,
much as they may have been valued, have
had no champions of the likes of Fry or
Schapiro; among others Lawrence Cowing
has written about them with an artist's eye
but without making the large claims for their
centrality that Fry and Schapiro made for
still life. And though he sent a share of watercolors
to his first one-artist show atAmbroise
Vollard's gallery in 7895 and then ten years
later agreed to let Vollard put on an exhibition
devoted exclusively to his watercolors,
Cezanne himself was inclined to write them
off as things of little substance, less than
earth-shatteringly important. It is precisely
because ofwatercolor's insubstantiality, its
lightness of being, and in Cezanne's case the
greater ease and airiness of the watercolors
relative to the oils, that this is so: for in them
Cezanne's legendary struggles at "realization"
weigh less heavily, and his famous
turbulence is quieted. So it is, again, less possible
to tell the story of his watercolors as
a mighty modernist battle.
Nevertheless, Cezanne's work in watercolor
and pencil is often unusually complex
for the medium, particularly in highly developed
pictures like Still Life with Blue Pot
in which the artist made the most of what is
most difficult about watercolor painting.
What is plotted in them—and that is the
other part of the tale that I want to tell
here—is the story of the artist's very process.
For that process—tied up as it is with the
artist's "handwriting"and "deformations,"his
manual orchestration of the still-life arrangement,
and his corporeal investment in its
space—is put on display in watercolor on
paper in a way that it is not in oil on canvas.
In some of Cezanne's simpler watercolors,
the process of designing and coloring is laid
bare; in complex pieces like Still Life with
Blue Pot it submerges and then surfaces, fascinating
the viewer into sharing the dialogue
between eye and hand that is the very life
of drawing and painting.
Most of Cezanne's best watercolors date
from the last years of his life, the period in
which he executed Still Life with Blue Pot in
his last studio at Les Lauves. This was also the
period in which he was at work on the more
famous series of the great Bathers, and in
which he continued to labor on the nowfamiliar
shape of Mont Sainte-Victoire in oil
and in watercolor. And it was the period in
which he had garnered a reputation for himself,
with avant-garde group shows in Paris
and elsewhere, one-artist exhibitions with his
dealer Vollard, and the growing adulation of
young painters like Maurice Denis and Emile
Bernard, who deified Cezanne and left us his
apocrypha. But Cezanne had drawn and
painted in watercolors well before he became
modernism's grand old man, and we will have
occasion to look across his career and see
how his process changed from his early to his
late efforts. We will see also how he used the
delicate veils that watercolor allows and even
demands, sometimes to simple and sometimes
to complex effect, sometimes with and
4
CEZANNE IN THE STUDIO