Still Life in Watercolors

the genre and the animate world of the human subject looking at them ; of the bodiliness
of both sides of the subject-object divide, and of the corporeality this side of
the pictorial surface. This clearly was what Cezanne's studio was all about: a place
for studying the bodily relations—exchanges, substitutions, and affinities—between
the human subject and the world of inanimate objects. For us, Cezanne's studio, and
the objects placed within it, can also be a site to understand the curious changing of
places, across his work, between animacy and inanimacy: in which the human body
and face are stilled and crystalline like geological formations, while objects begin to
vibrate with anthropomorphic life.
One in particular of Cezanne's still lifes in watercolor, however, presses outside
the studio: in Hortensia of around 1895-1900 (pi. 10), the potted hydrangea (or
more likely geranium) seems to seek escape from the confines of the studio in order
to bridge the spaces between indoors and outdoors, still life and landscape. Painted
at least a decade later than the sketchbook page discussed above (fig. 13), this
Hortensia plays no word games and shares no intimate space with the face of
Cezanne's wife; indeed it seems to brook neither intimacy nor enclosure, as it has
even escaped the pot to which it belongs (a second, unfinished stem is found next
to it, pentimento-like, within the pot), and leans with human fervor toward the window,
whose diagonal line of curtain opposes the sweep of its yearning slant. Like a
romantic woman at the window (its floral character suggests its femininity, even
without any association with one particular woman in Cezanne's life), it seems bent
on release from its confinement to the interior, its stillness, its very condition of
plantedness. And with its straining stem it is more alive than any portrait of Hortense
(or anyone else) that Cézanne ever painted, as powerful as those portraits are.
In between studio and open air, indoors and outdoors, are the potted plants
that inhabit the garden—or the greenhouse—but make it into a close-up, walled-off
space of confinement, an extension of the interior of house and studio, rather than
something exterior to them. Such is the case of the potted geranium series (pi. 11) of
a decade earlier than the so-called Hortensia, as well as of the series of trellis roses of
the 18905. These begin to provide a scrim of foliage that mediates between horizontal
and vertical surface, figure and ground, singular object and tapestry-like patterning,
worked and unworked areas of paper—as if the earth on which the pot rests and the
wall that separates the garden from the house or the world beyond the painter's property
together have mutated into the flat surface of the paper on which the painter
draws and paints. Such intermediate subjects had been taken up earlier by the gardening
painters Monet, Renoir (fig. 29), and Caillebotte as well, as "modern life" variations
on the old subject of the flower piece, in which the flowers were now rooted
in the nineteenth-century middle-class garden. But in Cezanne's case, the up-to-date
context is missing; instead the subject asserts its in-betweenness, between indoor
and outdoor study, still life subject and foliate sketch.
Once fully outside, Cézanne, as we know, painted his landscapes and made
landscape studies, few of which have anything interior about them, though anthropomorphism
is everywhere in the air. Some of his landscape studies, however, are
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THE LANDSCAPE OF STILL LIFE