Still Life in Watercolors

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Detail 5 Figure 17 Paul Cézanne Mo/it Sainte-Victoire, c.1901-6 Watercolor and graphite on pale buff wove paper, 31.9 x 47.6 cm (12 9 / 16 x 18 3 /4 in.) The Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation, Inc., 1.1988.62.44 Figure 18 Paul Cézanne Chemin des Lauves: The Turn in the Road, c. 1904-6 Watercolor and graphite on cream wove paper, 47.9 x 58.6 cm (i8 7 /s x 23 in.) The Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation, Inc., 1.1988.62.42 49 THE LANDSCAPE OF STILL LIFE
Figure 19 Nicolas Poussin (French, 1594-1665) Landscape with the Body ofPhodon Carried out of Athens, 1648 Oil on canvas, 114 x 175 cm (44 7 /s x 68 7 /s in.) Cardiff, National Museum of Wales. Lent by the Earl of Plymouth, NMW A (L) 480 Foreground, middle ground, and background: as schematic divisions of the space seen through an illusory window or behind a fictive proscenium arch, these sectors are as important as the horizon line to the space of landscape painting. And they are particularly characteristic of the French classical landscape, from that of Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain down to late eighteenth- and early- to -mid-nine teen th -cen tury inheritors of the tradition of the paysage historique, such as Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, Achille- Etna Michallon, Jean-Victor Bertin, andJean - Baptiste-Camille Corot 3 This was the tradition to which Cézanne felt himself to belong. To show how this worked, one would usually paira Mont Sainte-Victoire with Poussin's most canonical heroic landscape, that showing the burial ofPhodon (fig. 19). But it is a still life like the Getty watercolor whose navigation of foreground, middle ground, and background stands up to comparison with something like Poussin's famous landscape and does so much better than any of Cezanne's actual landscapes. For just as Poussin cut a winding path from front to back of his composition so that the viewer could follow the narrative course of the movement of the burial, so the apples of this still life move us carefully and windingly from front to middle to back, only this time the meandering movement they trace is the circuit of the eye around a little pot and back through the folds of a piece of tapestry, rather than a funeral's solemn traversal of space. Hollowing out the mound of fruit that was the staple of the still-life tradition, so that all that is left of its single, mounded mass are its points of dispersal, and inverting the massing of solids that continued to be so central to still life into the point-by-point plotting of a course that is more familiar in landscape painting, it is as if Cézanne had declared the genre of still life to be the proper place for the transformation of the classical narrative of the hero's journey through life into the itinerary of the viewing subject's encounter with objective space. In a famous remark, Cézanne said that he wanted to paint Balzac's "tablecloth white as a layer of newly fallen snow, upon which the place-settings rise symmetrically, crowned with blond rolls, " so that "if I really balance and shade my place-settings and rolls as they are in nature, then you can be sure that the crowns, the snow, and all the excitement will be there too." 4 Thus he not only spoke to the relationship between the literary and the pictorial, the objective and the subjective, but also articulated the relay between landscape and still life. Indeed, he suggested that he wanted still life to do the job of landscape, if not that of history painting as well. If the apocrypha are true, and Cézanne really wanted to redo Poussin "after nature, " then still life, more than any of the other genres he practiced, was the one in which he truly attempted to carry out that project. 5 50 CÉZANNE IN THE STUDIO
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CEZANNE IN THE STUDIO Still Life in
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Notes to the Reader Objects in the
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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 and 50: Plate 5 Paul Cezanne Jacket on a Ch
Page 51 and 52: Plate 6 Paul Cezanne St/7/ Life wit
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 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
Page 100 and 101: posy to indicate its existence and
Page 102 and 103: Plate 16 Paul Cézanne Plaster Cupi
Page 104 and 105: Figure 36 Paul Cézanne Seated Woma
Page 106 and 107: Figure 38 Paul Cézanne Ginger Pot
Page 108 and 109: Plate 17 Paul Cézanne Still Life w
Page 110 and 111: Figure 40 Paul Cezanne Still Life w
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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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