Still Life in Watercolors

Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston, 111.:
Northwestern University Press, 1964), 9-25.
(Merleau-Ponty takes the opportunity to critique
the tradition of the biography and to invert the
usual determining relationship between a hypothesis
such as Cezanne's "schizoid" temperament'
and the oddities of his art, such that it is the art
that gives meaning to that temperament rather
than the other way around.)
18. It is possible that the drawings on this page
were done at different times: the bather with
outstretched arms relates to a painting that
has been dated to 1885 (see Cachin and Rishel,
Cezanne, 178).
19. See Theodore Reff and Innis Howe Shoemaker,
Paul Cézanne: Two Sketchbooks (Philadelphia:
Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1989). See also Wayne
Andersen, Cezanne's Portrait Drawings (Cambridge
and London: MIT Press, 1970).
20. Cézanne was classically educated, very interested
in language and literature, and tried his hand at
poetry early on. The language play involved in this
watercolor is a subtler version of the sort of word
game that crops up in his youthful letters to Zola.
See Paul Cézanne, Correspondance, éd. John Rewald
(Paris: Editions Grasset et Fasquelîe, 1978), 17-42,
45-61 (1858-59). See also Meyer Schapiro, "The
Apples of Cézanne: An Essay on the Meaning
of Still-Life" (1968), in Modern Art: Nineteenth and
Twentieth Centuries (New York: George Braziller,
1979), 1-38-
21. Rainer Maria Rilke, Lettres sur Cézanne, trans.
Philippe Jacottet (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1991);
77. It was Cezanne's uncanny Still Life with a Black
Clock (1869-70), which he gave as a gift to Zola
and which depicted some of Zola's possessions, that
Rilke described this way: "tout à gauche un grand
coquillage baroque du genre triton—étrange avec
son embouchure rouge et lisse tournée vers nous.
Son carmin intérieur, qui va s'éclaircissant sur la
courbure."
22. Here I refer to his Banquet (also known as
the Feast and the Orgy) of 1867-72 and the set of
images related to it, some of which put elaborate,
baroque still lifes in the foreground.
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THE BIOGRAPHY OF OBJECTS