Still Life in Watercolors

to the hortensia bloom, and its lack of color, also suggests some distantiation, as if in
memory. Either way, this drawing-cum-watercolor speaks to the way such associations
are produced, in the studio, out of a half-conscious web in which language and
vision, drawing and coloring, eye and hand, objective and intimate relations are intimately
yet differentially related.
But these sketches are very rare intimations of intimacy within the zone of
still life. None of Cezanne's other bathers, or portrait heads, or even florals in either
oil or watercolor suggests the relationships between different subject material or the
connections between biography and the studio that these do so directly. The glass in
one sketch, the flower in the other, and the bits of bed, chair, plate, and knife in the
others do, however, say something about how that connection operated elsewhere in
still life: by formal substitutions and reversals, inflections and off-page intimations.
As we have already seen, Cezanne could inflect the studio with the kitchen—the
space of art with that of domesticity—and vice versa in his still lifes, as if, indeed,
still life were the place to work out, ever so elusively, the disconnect between art and
household that marked his life. As we have also seen, within his still lifes he could
intimate an offstage space that might just be the studio's absent home. He could
include furnishings that suggested bodily inhabitation but that gaped with the
absence of actual bodies or of people with whom he was familiar. And he could, as
he did in Still Life with Blue Pot, deploy the physical and formal associations between
objects as substitutes for the social and affective ties between people: I, for one, have
only to look at the triangular relationship between blue pot, slender white pitcher,
and smaller white pot, in which the blue pot lords it over the others, the white pitcher
stands aside, and the little white pot both mimics and tries to hold its own against
the blue pot above and behind it, jostling slightly with it, to start thinking of the family
triangle of father, mother, and son, and more generally of the jockeying for power
and the play of dominion and submission that mark human relations. These connections
are all in the imagination, of course, which is where Cezanne left them; they
depend upon still life's innate joining of the atelier and the domicile, to which we
will return in the next section.
Cezanne's late watercolors, like Still Life with Blue Pot, mostly belong to the
period of the Les Lauves studio, when an ill and cantankerous Cezanne had definitively
separated the two sides of his life. Yet the late watercolor still lifes, as a group,
are also the more suggestive of various kinds of relationships to a world beyond the
studio than any of his other work of the period, including the still lifes in oil. Earlier
sketches, such as those in which Cezanne tried out homely rumpled beds and hanging
towels as still-life subjects, had intimated that relationship in some of the ways
just outlined. A curtained doorway (fig. 14) suggests the relation between studio
property and serviceable fabric, not to mention the threshold of a world beyond the
studio: the house and family of Cezanne? A little green jug in watercolor and pencil,
also from the mid-eighties (pi. 4), suggests some sort of human bravado in its lone
stance against a studio shelf or wall: its roundness, its strange effect of small monumentality,
and its two handles—one atop its lip, the other curving from its mouth
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THE BIOGRAPHY OF OBJECTS