Still Life in Watercolors

Figure 7
Paul Cezanne
Stili Life with Basket; or,
The Kitchen Table, 1888-90
Oil on canvas, 65 x 80 cm
(25 5 /8 x 3i 1 / 2in.)
Paris, Musee d'Orsay
R.F. 2819
by Michelangelo—or rather a plaster cast after that sculpture, which also still sits in
the studio. A loose piece of green fruit, indeterminately an apple, sits at the base of
that canvas-cum-sculpture-cum-cast. Where Still Life with Basket; or, The Kitchen
Table situated its still life in the space named in its title, insinuating art making into
that space with its palette, inkwell, screen, and portfolio, and hinting at expeditions
outside into the landscape with the picnic basket and the satchel, Still Life with
Plaster Cast, in contrast, clearly situates the still life in the atelier, while playing on
the relationship between dimensions (two and three), media (painting within painting
and sculpture within painting), and copies (a painting within a painting after a
copy of a sculpture). That is pure studio play; no food preparation takes place in Still
Life with Plaster Cast, not even the preparing of a painter's picnic basket for an outing
to paint Mont Sainte-Victoire, perhaps. But a relationship to the kitchen is at least
intimated by the inclusion of homely onions among the painting's studio apples. 4
Both paintings suggest two things that are important to our understanding of
the Getty Still Life with Blue Pot. The first is the tying of the surface of the canvas and
the top of the still-life table to a physical space in which one is not only invited to
handle things but is also offered chairs in which to sit and floors on which to stand or
walk. The second is this: that the space of the atelier stands in relation to the domestic
*5
THE BIOGRAPHY OF OBJECTS