Still Life in Watercolors

Figure 4
Cezanne's studio at Les Lauves
Detail i
the apples appear to be fewer in number, and
the handle of the blue pot is lifted in a halolike
arc above its lid, but otherwise the objects
and even the indeterminate corner space are
the same. And then one gradually realizes
what is missing from both of them: they have
none of the porcelain compotiers, glass bottles,
carafes and glasses, plates, flowered
pitchers and sugar bowls, or rough-glazed
ginger pots and ceramic wares that are found
throughout Cezanne's still lifes and that—
together with plaster cupid, ecorche, and
skulls—still line the various shelves and surfaces
of the studio at Les Lauves today (fig. 4).
Only their tapestry, red-striped white linen
and fruit, and the pitcher show up in other
still lifes. Moreover, as simple and crude
as the objects that remain in Cezanne's studio
are, they are at least more permanent than
the two metal pots at the center of these
two compositions, which, judging from some
of the metal items that are still found in the
atelier, have long since rusted away (detail i).
But permanent or not, what one can
say about the three main items at the center
of Still Life with Blue Pot is that they form
a sort of family trio, made up of the dominant
blue pot, the helpmeet milk pitcher and
the hemmed-in, dominated little white pot,
genetically similar to the larger blue one
behind it, trying vainly to assert itself. Father,
mother, son? (Or is it mother, father, son?)
Perhaps, but it surely suggests, along with
the flowering rusticity of Cezanne's Provencal
world and the spartan simplicity of his
hermit's retreat, something else that was
common to his still lifes in oil and watercolor:
the anthropomorphism of object relations.
11
THE BIOGRAPHY OF OBJECTS