Still Life in Watercolors

projecting movement around it. Then, they
graph the symmetry of that central object,
with two apples in front and one apple on
each side of the white pot At the same
time—with each of their slightly different
distances from the center point of the white
pot—they serve to indicate the departures
from symmetry that accompany any act of
perception, any movement of the eye across
and around objects, no matter how smooth
and perfectly formed: the departures from
symmetry that distinguish between the inanimacy
of ideal, Platonic shapes and the
animate bodiliness of real, sensate entities,
between abstract concepts and material
things that one sees, grasps, and eats—or
at least wants to see, grasp, and eat—and
that Cézanne drew with a trembling, bodily
hand, warping perfection with desire. The
four apples also serve to map out relations
between positive and negative spaces—
between the convex and the concave, between
masses and crevices, hills and hollows,
the space that describes objects and the
space between and around objects, between,
in short, the presence and absence of objects.
Further, the four apples help to diagram
the difference between different degrees of
overlap and separation, between rectilinearity
(the milk jug) and the curve, between the
two-dimensional (the napkin) and the threedimensional,
between the blank white of
the paper and the volumetric illusion that is
created upon it and that is condensed in the
apples'white highlights, between warm and
cool coloration, as well as between simple
sphere and more complicated shape. Without
names attached to them, these four dimple-
Detail 2
less, navel-less, stemless apples are barely
distinguishable from peaches, oranges,
plums, or even onions. They are barely apples,
but rather spheres, ever so slightly distended,
and in that too they chart the territory
between the general idea and the particular
sensation of the apple.
The handle of the white pot appears just
barely to touch the third of those four apples
(just as the handle of the blue kettle behind it
appears just barely to touch the very tip of
the hilt of the white pot's lid—of its apex or
its nipple, depending on whether one wants
to think of it as a geometry or a body), thus
marking a confrontation between an arc
that is empty, slicing through air and shadow,
and an arc that is full, full of the flesh and
skin of an apple, as well as between the cold
of blue and the warm of gold, and between
optical and tactile sensations. And finally,
those four apples stake out the threshold
between stillness and movement, balance and
imbalance. Look at the two foremost apples,
whose repeated contours appear to move
them closer and closer together, filling the
gap between them, until they almost touch
each other. And now look at the other two
apples, the leftmost one nestled securely in
its bed of white cloth, cradled between
the two other objects, while the one at the
right is more subtly balanced, ready to roll
off the flowered tapestry at the slightest
twitch of its imaginary folds. There is even an
arcing fold in the tapestry just beneath
that apple, which suggests the trajectory of
its future fall.
But there are seven—or even eight—
apples: what of the other three—or four?
Paler and more distant, they are harder to
see —placed at the fictive back of the composition,
it is as if they are unripe, in the
painterly sense. Without much color—they
are almost all white ground, so that it is
hard to describe that white as a highlight
anymore—suffused in some sort of still-life
version of atmospheric perspective, they
seem not fully painted and therefore not quite
ready to be seen yet, certainly not ready to
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CÉZANNE IN THE STUDIO