Still Life in Watercolors

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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 3 1 THE BIOGRAPHY OF OBJECTS
Figure 14 Paul Cezanne Curtains, 1885 Watercolor, gouache, and graphite on white paper, 49 x 307 cm (19 x 12 in.) Paris, Musee du Louvre, Fonds Orsay past its neck to its hip—are irresistible in suggesting a fat little complacent figure, body replete with belly outthrust, head erect, and arm akimbo. Thus it suggests some of the human affect proposed above for the central triangle of objects in the Getty still life. And Jacket on a Chair (pi. 5) from the early 18905, rendered in pencil with a hint of watercolor, suggests human habitation by dint of its very absence. With its empty, crumpled jacket, it is even more blatant in that suggestion than Cezanne's sketches of empty chairs, and at the same time it situates its uncanny effect of 32 CEZANNE IN THE STUDIO
Page 6 and 7: CEZANNE IN THE STUDIO Still Life in
Page 8: Notes to the Reader Objects in the
Page 12 and 13: Foreword Paul Cezanne's role as the
Page 14 and 15: Lenders to the Exhibition Our thank
Page 16 and 17: Opening Lines L/ ike many a still l
Page 18 and 19: Figure 2 Paul Cezanne Still Life wi
Page 20 and 21: sometimes against the grain of the
Page 22: Terrasse, Les acquarelles de Cezann
Page 25 and 26: Figure 3 Paul Ce~zanne Still Life w
Page 27 and 28: CEZANNE PAINTED STILL LiFES from th
Page 29 and 30: palette for the dark density of the
Page 31 and 32: Figure 8 Paul Cezanne St/7/ Life wi
Page 33 and 34: went on like this, with sojourns in
Page 35 and 36: It was also in Paris that the other
Page 37 and 38: Cezanne and his wife, it became a h
Page 39 and 40: Plate 2 Paul Cezanne Head of a Chil
Page 41 and 42: Plate 3 Paul Cezanne The Artist's S
Page 43 and 44: But what have these to do with stil
Page 45: Figure 13 Paul Cezanne Madame Cezan
Page 49 and 50: Plate 5 Paul Cezanne Jacket on a Ch
Page 51 and 52: Plate 6 Paul Cezanne St/7/ Life wit
Page 53 and 54: Plate 7 Paul Cezanne Still Life wit
Page 55 and 56: And then there is the baroque still
Page 57 and 58: Carol Armstrong (Princeton: Princet
Page 60 and 61: The landscape of Still seí i/s /oo
Page 62 and 63: e touched and grasped (detail 3). T
Page 64 and 65: Detail 5 Figure 17 Paul Cézanne Mo
Page 66 and 67: JHESE DAYS SOMEONE STILL LEAVES APP
Page 68 and 69: Three general observations that der
Page 70 and 71: other, though few of his compositio
Page 72 and 73: Figure 24 Gustave Courbet (French,
Page 74 and 75: dinner, replete with crystal ware,
Page 76 and 77: surface of the painting itself. In
Page 78 and 79: Figure 28 Paul Cézanne Young Itali
Page 80 and 81: framework for again and again learn
Page 82 and 83: the genre and the animate world of
Page 84 and 85: Plate 11 Paul Cézanne Geraniums, 1
Page 86 and 87: than anything Cézanne ever did ins
Page 88: opposite of the first, having to wi
Page 91: Detail 6 > layered surface, whose m
Page 94 and 95: of exhibitable work: the Impression
Page 96 and 97:
fruits have escaped their container
Page 98 and 99:
Plate 14 Paul Cézanne Apples, Bott
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posy to indicate its existence and
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Plate 16 Paul Cézanne Plaster Cupi
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Figure 36 Paul Cézanne Seated Woma
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Figure 38 Paul Cézanne Ginger Pot
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Plate 17 Paul Cézanne Still Life w
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Figure 40 Paul Cezanne Still Life w
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Plate 19 Paul Cezanne Still Life wi
Page 114:
NOTES 1. See Peter Galassi, Corot i
Page 117 and 118:
Figure 41 Computer-enhanced infrare
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Saint Marcel les Annonay paper (det
Page 121 and 122:
Detail 11 splatters, and subtle fau
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Detail 14 irresolution while unsett
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Detail 18 horizons that were not es
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Detail 21 visibly definite contour
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Detail 27 > Detail 26 red, one buil
Page 137 and 138:
I F STILL LIFE WITH BLUE POT is UNU
Page 139 and 140:
Plate 20 Paul Cezanne St/7/ Life: F
Page 141 and 142:
Plate 21 Paul Cezanne 7/iree Pears,
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evident, but that process is method
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in my view ; is what Cezanne's late
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water to pigment, and the watercolo
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a fundamental rethinking of the str
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Jinishing Touches 0n the side of th
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is germane to its objects as well a
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Keys to Details Key to details 1-6
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Key to details 14-29 143
Page 160 and 161:
Emperaire, Achilla, 19 esquisses, 7
Page 162 and 163:
landscape of, 45-50; 53, 64 line an
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Still Life in Watercolors

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