Still Life in Watercolors

old sign of the still-life tradition, the white linen. The watercolor's rounded objects,
then, sit in for us and our bodiliness. But at the same time the patterned tapestry with
its hump reminds us of landscape too, set at an optical distance, while the horizon
on the wall in the back and the tenting of blue-green marks above the still-life
arrangement and above the earthen part of the background wall, the most planar
aspect of the image, reinforce the landscape aura of the still life. Thus it represents
the meeting between two different spatial conceptions of the picture, each belonging
to a different genre: the optical planes and distance of landscape, and the concentric
"manual space" of still life. They meet at the tabletop, which might also be a sofa, and
the hinted-at floor at the bottom right.
wE HAVE ALREADY SEEN HOW some of Cezanne's sketches in watercolor
and pencil suggest intersections between different genres: the pages with
images of Cezanne's son, Paul, and his wife, Hortense, not only introduce rare notes
of the intimacy of a private life into the working processes of the studio; they also
suggest meetings between the genres of the portrait, the nude (the classical body that
is the basis of all the higher genres, from mythological to history painting), and the
still life. Sketching allows for such note taking to bring diverse, unrelated subject
matter together onto the same surface and into the same image space. But it also suggests
that for Cézanne the sketch page, and indeed the combined media of pencil and
watercolor, was a realm in which to think about different genres, their spaces, and
their meanings together.
Of all the painters of his generation, Cézanne was perhaps most preoccupied
with the genre divisions as they had existed since the classical hierarchy of the
seventeenth-century academic system. He painted the nude, with related forays into
religious and mythological painting; he undertook genre painting, in the form of his
repeated Cardplayers; he excelled at the portrait and the self-portrait; and he devoted
himself to landscape and still life. (These would also be the quite traditional genre
divisions of Cezanne's Cubist descendants, Picasso and Braque.) Unlike the
Impressionist group with which he was associated, Cézanne took on these genre divisions
in a conventional way and maintained them fairly strictly. He did not—as his
cohorts Monet, Renoir, and Degas did—depart from them to invent new subjects, in
which the traces of old subject-matter categories can only dimly be felt in their mutation
into "modern life" motifs (like the city, the café, the railroad, and suburban
leisure, motifs that Cézanne almost never took up and never took up straight when
he did). Ultimately the old system of genres is dispensed with in the paintings of
modern life by the group with which Cézanne had exhibited, who in their calls for a
"new painting" constantly opposed the representation of the world's scenes to the
value system and studio practices of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. 20 In contrast, the old
genre system structured Cezanne's output quite overtly, providing him with the basic
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CÉZANNE IN THE STUDIO