Still Life in Watercolors

questions of volume and overlap and balance;
of before and behind and between; of
singling out, clustering, and numbering one,
two, three, or more; encounters between
the optical and tactile aspects of the object
world; the charting of objective space by
the subjective eye. 2 Yet there are nonetheless
landscapelike things about this still life.
Horizon and distance; foreground, middle
ground, and background; atmospheric perspective;
ravines, crevices, and valleys;
mountains, boulders, and bridges; hills, hollows,
and waterfalls: these are words that
describe the space of landscape. They are
also words that describe this as well as other
still Ufes by Cézanne, with their hallucinatory
indeterminacy of scale and bodily address.
A horizon line is surely evoked by the
wainscoting course that slices through Still
Life with Blue Pot about two-thirds of the way
up from the bottom of the image (detail 4).
The coloration is more or less green-blue,
like sky, above that line, and more or less redbrown,
like earth, below it. Both above and
below that line, the coloration is mixed with
greens and reddish tints, in Cezanne's habitual
tessera-shaped brush strokes and his
equally habitual manner of unifying his composition
by means of the nonlocal distribution
of the colors of his palette across the space
of the paper. Nonetheless, that line does
mark a general shift in coloration as well
as a shift toward the top in degree of transparency,
suggesting the lightness of air above
the line where the land ends. It is significant,
also, that that line belongs to the background
wall rather than to a table or ledge and thus
to enframing architecture, and the vertical
Detail 4
planes of pictorial support and perspectival
distance, rather than the close-up horizontality
of the object world and its ground. It is
significant, as well, that that line is a bit
irregular, especially toward the left, with its
dip downward, and that it is interrupted, also
toward the left, by the hill of flowered tapestry
(detail 5), just as Mont Sa inte-Victoire
typically erupts from the left-hand side
of the horizon line of the flat Provençal plain
of Cezanne's native Aix (fig. 17), or a hill
cascades down past a road on the way to the
studio at Les Lauves (fig. 18). Horizon lines
are fundamental to the space of landscape
painting, constituting it as such, defining
its back limits as well as the meeting between
above and below, sky and land, and describing
the profile of the land that is so crucial to
it, that makes a landscape recognizable
as a landscape even when abstracted from its
local landmarks and its illusion of threedimensionality.
(One might think ahead to
Helen Frankenthaler's and Richard
Diebenkorn's landscapelike abstractions.)
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CÉZANNE IN THE STUDIO