Still Life in Watercolors

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Figure 15 Paul Cezanne Still Life with Apples, Pears, and a Pot, 1900-1904 Watercolor and graphite on white paper, 28.1 x 47.8 cm (11 x 18 3 A in.) Paris, Musee du Louvre, Fonds Orsay human presence-in-absence in the studio, as a studio exercise. In short, watercolor sketches had long been the site of experimentation with still life's possibilities of biographical intimation. It was in the late watercolor still lifes, however, that Cezanne made full-blown pictures out of such experimentation. There is, for instance, a watercolor of 1900- 1904 that inserts the black handle of a humdrum cooking pot disconcertingly into an eye-level shelf of fruit whose row of blood-ripened, buttocklike roundnesses thoroughly justifies Meyer Schapiro's claims for the sexuality of Cezanne's fruit (fig. 15). Does that pot handle truly speak of the kitchen anymore? It does so only to index its removal from the kitchen and the transformation of its function from cooking utensil to studio prop and from there to bodily and sexual displacement: never was a pot handle atop a couple of pears so preposterously phallic, and never was the row of fruit in the midst of which it erects itself so fleshy, so cleft, so bloody, and so luscious. Never, that is to say, were the "apples [pears] of Cezanne" so overtly sexual, so exaggeratedly corporeal, as in this kitchen-table-which-is-not-a-kitchen-table. The same pot, by the way, sits more unobtrusively next to a cleft, red-slashed watermelon and projecting knife handle in another watercolor of the same period (pi. 6). There it is the watermelon that is sexualized, becoming, as Rainer Maria Rilke would describe the livid mouth of a vaginal conch in a more famous still life by Cezanne, a "smooth red orifice" whose "inward carmine bulg[es] out into brightness." 21 But if Cezanne's 35 THE BIOGRAPHY OF OBJECTS
Plate 6 Paul Cezanne St/7/ Life with Cut Watermelon, c. 1900 Watercolor and graphite on white paper, 31.5 x 47.5 cm (i2 5 / 8 x i8 3 /4in.) Riehen/Basel, Fondation Beyeler 78.1 kitchen pot sits unobtrusively next to A a cleft, red-slashed watermelon and pro- knife handle in this late watercolor. jecting Here the watermelon is sexualized, becoming, as Rainer Maria Rilke would describe the livid mouth of a vaginal conch in a more famous still life by Cezanne, a "smooth red orifice" whose "inward carmine bulg[es] out into brightness." Both this and the Louvre St/7/ Life with Apples, Pears, and a Pot (fig. 15) suggest the much more openended relation between pencil contouring and the pigmented liquidity of watercolor, as well as the more indeterminate position of the study between sketch and tableau, which characterizes Cezanne's late works in watercolor. 36 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 and 46: Figure 13 Paul Cezanne Madame Cezan
Page 47 and 48: Figure 14 Paul Cezanne Curtains, 18
Page 49: Plate 5 Paul Cezanne Jacket on a Ch
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
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NOTES 1. See Peter Galassi, Corot i
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Figure 41 Computer-enhanced infrare
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Saint Marcel les Annonay paper (det
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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
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I F STILL LIFE WITH BLUE POT is UNU
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Plate 20 Paul Cezanne St/7/ Life: F
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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
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Emperaire, Achilla, 19 esquisses, 7
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landscape of, 45-50; 53, 64 line an
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Still Life in Watercolors

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