Still Life in Watercolors

point." In another famous dictum, he remarked: "The eye becomes concentric by
looking and working. I mean to say that in an orange, an apple, a ball, a head, there's
a culminating point; and this point is always . . . closest to our eye; the edges of
objects flee toward a center placed on our horizon." 12 What these remarks suggest is
not so much Cubism—if anything it should be "spherism," because Cezanne's emphasis
is upon a round/not an angular, geometry—not so much a new and abstract
system of post-Euclidean geometry as an emphasis on rounded still-life objects—"an
orange, an apple, a ball, a head"—taken up-close and one by one. There is also an
inversion of the old perspectival space of the painting-as-window, so that "central"
and "culminating points," of which there are as many as there are objects, push outward,
toward us, rather than inward, toward a single vanishing point; the "horizon"
is here where we are, rather than at the back of or behind the painting, and the bodily
screen upon which that horizon lies—our eye—is curved ("concentric"), not flat,
corporeal, not abstract.
The still-life tradition had always courted the eye with the display of optical
effects to which its arrays of glassware and metalware set against the differentiated
texture and sheen of fruit and cloth lent themselves. And certainly Cezanne's remarks
emphasize the eye (his and the viewer's) and its relation to the painted world.
Yet even more than Chardin's still-life paintings, which solicit the hand as well as the
eye in a variety of ways, Cezanne's still lifes suggest a "manual space." That is the
phrase of a Cubist, Georges Braque, and it is entirely applicable to Cezanne's still
lifes, though not in any Cubist way. In fact, Braque spoke about still life: "Then above
all I began to make still lifes, because in nature there is a tactile space, I would say
almost a manual space. Moreover, I have written: 'When a still life is no longer within
reach of the hand, it ceases to be a still life.' For me this corresponds to the desire
that I have always had to touch the thing and not only to see it." 13 We will have occasion
later to look closely at the eye-hand coordination that Cézanne explored in his
very process of drawing and painting; for the moment, let us consider the ways in
which the peculiar, "concentric" spatiality of his still lifes and their objects appeals to
the hand as well as to the eye—indeed, more than that, suggests a bodily and not just
an optical realm.
Certainly simple early works like the Still Life with Apples of around 1877-78
(fig. 20) illustrate Braque's notion of still life's "manual space" as well as the idea of
a "prehensile eye" that tries to grasp what it sees. 14 I have already touched on Roger
Fry's "manual" response to Cezanne's Still Life with Compotier (fig. 2), which pertains
to Cezanne's adaptation of a Chardinian device, the drawer handle that asks to be
pulled. (Moreover, that still life has the projecting knife that abounds in the still-life
tradition and that also solicits the hand.) Then there is the later Still Life with Apples
(fig. 8), which seems to want to invert itself and push forward toward the viewer's
eye and hand, as if swelling from a purely optical background into a tactile foreground.
And I have dwelt at length on the expanded spaces of some of Cezanne's still
lifes, such as Still Life with Basket; or, The Kitchen Table and Still Life with Plaster
Cast (figs. 7, 32), in which room to walk and sit surrounds and inflects the tabletop
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CÉZANNE IN THE STUDIO