Still Life in Watercolors

Figure 16
Paul Cezanne
Bottles, Pot, Alcohol
Stove, and Apples,
c. 1900-1906
Watercolor and graphite
on paper, 47 x 56 cm
(i8 1 /z x 22 in.)
Private collection
"kitchen tables" leave the kitchen behind to assert the context of the studio as the
space of art and its ability to make things into bodies, at the same time they point to
the kitchen offstage—and to the space of the house beyond—by its very absence,
always marking its possible though invisible contiguity with the realm of the studio.
And, paradoxically, they do so more insistently than any other still-life oeuvre that I
can think of.
There is, for instance, from the same period (1900-1906), the table overflowing
with kitchen items, obviously removed from the kitchen to make a studio
still life, but nevertheless suggesting the kitchen to such a point of excess and overload
that overdetermination and obsession rear their heads (fig. 16). The kitchen is
simultaneously everywhere and nowhere in the atelier; it is colonized by the atelier,
and it is the atelier's other. Indeed, this "kitchen table" is so chock full of kitchen
implements—bottles, pitchers, pots, burners, sugar casters, and of course fruit—that
it gives new meaning to the expression "everything but the kitchen sink." Yet they
look like such objects look on moving day, gathered together in surplus, not in use, as
if for an inventory of all the kitchen items that had been stolen for studio purposes.
Thus this kitchen table too, in its very excess of kitchenness, marks the replacement
of the kitchen by the studio.
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THE BIOGRAPHY OF OBJECTS