Still Life in Watercolors

palette for the dark density of the earlier work. They also begin to open up the space
around their narrow shelves of objects to a degree, by the traditional means of projecting
knife and drawer handles. The leafy blue-green wallpaper in the 1880 still life
evokes the air and verdure of the outdoors. Meanwhile, a half-full glass of water
still suggests that someone might pick it up and drink it, while the knife suggests
that someone might cut one of the apples, and the dark, outward-projecting drawer
handle, with its peculiarly diminished prong of shadow, suggests that we ourselves
might be tempted to stretch out a hand, pull it, and look inside. For his part, Fry saw
that black handle and its shadow as a flaw in Cezanne's composition, a defect (something
like a facial tic) that marred the obviously consistent "handwriting" of the rest
and thus impugned the expressionist logic of the still life's "deformations"—namely,
its diagonal brushwork and the stretched-out contours of its objects, most obviously
the warped ellipse of the compotier and the conical apex of the rightmost apple, signatures
of Cezanne's special way of feeling and painting, as Fry saw it. Indeed,
instead of wanting to stretch out his hand and open up the drawer, Fry expressed a
desire to "cover this part of the canvas with an indiscreet finger," thus simultaneously
emphasizing its literal surface over its fictive space, wishing away any fantasized
bodily encounter with that space, and yet willy-nilly interjecting a piece of himself, his
own digit, into, onto, and over it. 3 No matter, somehow Still Life with Compotier
solicits some sort of physical reaction from its viewer—some response of the hand
as well as the eye.
Roughly a decade later, at the end of the eighties and into the nineties,
Cezanne was painting still-life pictures in oil that widened the space of the tabletop
out to implications of a room beyond, sometimes the kitchen, sometimes the atelier,
sometimes both, sometimes neither, or neither very clearly. Most complexly, Still
Life with Basket; or, The Kitchen Table of 1888-90 (fig. 7) takes a crowded wooden
table with napkin, pears, ginger jar, matching pitcher and sugar bowl (the same
sugar bowl as in the little 1866 oil), and picnic basket of fruit and linen balancing
on the table's upper-right corner—replete with the "deformations" of the basket's distension,
the teetering of the porcelain ware, and the jogging of the table edge—and
sets it flat within a furniture-crowded space that includes floor and wall, one chair or
stool leg at the right edge of the picture, one straw-bottomed chair whose top disappears
beyond the upper-left corner of the painting, a piece of screen (painted by
Cezanne himself) and a piece of painting canvas or portfolio on the floor, and a
bureau or sideboard at the left edge of the painting on which sit a satchel, a palette,
and possibly an inkwell.
A half-dozen years after that, Cezanne painted Still Life with Plaster Cast
(c. 1894; fig. 32), for which a number of studies in watercolor were done as well. There
he added onions to his tabletop apples, a plaster cupid that still sits in his studio
(whose original was once thought to be by the seventeenth-century Provencal sculptor
Pierre Puget), a fold of blue tapestry with two apples in it at left, and a steeply
inclined floor walled by stacked canvases (by Cezanne), culminating, in the upperright
corner of the picture, in a cropped canvas depicting the bottom of a sculpture
14
CEZANNE IN THE STUDIO