Still Life in Watercolors

framework for again and again learning painting, and what painting can do, from the
ground up. The leveled lineaments of the genre hierarchy are felt over and over again
in his work, as if pointing to the system as such, except that, rather than a vertical
ladder of values, Cézanne configured it as a horizontal logic of distinctions, opening
onto a lateral dialogue among the genres, in which the function and meaning of each
genre begins to resonate in the other. Paintings of nudes begin to feel like grand still
lifes, for instance, while still lifes feel like bodies and geographies.
Cezanne's watercolor still lifes, whether in the mode of the sketch or that of the
full-fledged picture, clearly inhabit the spatial zone of their genre—ledge, counter,
tabletop, corner. Because of their more informal character, fewer of them implicate
larger spaces in the ways that some of the oils do, with the exceptions noted above,
and the Getty Still Life with Blue Pot, a picture in its own right rather than an unfinished
study of a still-life motif, is notable among those exceptions. So let us conclude
this meditation on Cezanne's generic spaces by looking at four other exceptional
watercolors from the late period, three of them still lifes in the exhibition, the fourth a
landscape study that approaches the spatial register of still life. All help to reinforce
the Getty watercolor's departures from the normal confined space of still life, its
address to the human body, and its hinted opening of the indoor world of the studio
to a world beyond.
One of the still-life subjects that Cézanne took up repeatedly was the human
skull—in groups of one, two, or three. (There are three currently displayed in the
studio at Les Lauves.) With its clear Vanitas association, this still-life theme defies
Roger Fry's rule that the subject matter of still life is insignificant; the pull of its morbidity
cannot have escaped Cézanne, the aging and curmudgeonly loner. Yet at the
same time Cézanne disposed his skulls like so many apples, and indeed Three Skulls
(pi. 9), from the same years as the Getty watercolor, has a composition very close to
that of Still Life with Blue Foi, replete with the floral tapestry, the central pile of
rounded things, and the background line of wall. (There is an oil version of the same
subject that even has the swatch of gold border at the bottom that we find in Still Life
with Blue Pot) 21 It is as if the subject of the skull(s) was one more spheroid body to
arrange and rearrange, to pull forward out of the flatness of the paper with pencil
and watercolor, to question the relation between figure and ground, line and color—
monochrome, hollowed skull and colorful floral patterning—to single out and group
en masse. Massed together on the tapestry the way the skulls are, there is less rather
than more uncanniness about them than when alone or paired and set against an
austere wall-and-table ground, as some of them are.
At the same time the overt bodiliness of the skull and its hollow-eyed stare
out at the viewer—like an object looking blindly back—declares what haunts the
other still lifes: that the objective world of still life is itself, more than purely optical
or even manual, a corporeal world, and that it looks and hinges upon the equally corporeal
space of the viewer. And it suggests that Cezanne's world of cylinders, spheres,
and cones is precisely, and literally, anthropomorphic/This is nature morte indeed,
but it demands recognition of the two-way relation between the inanimate objects of
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THE LANDSCAPE OF STILL LIFE