In a review of The Barnes Foundation’s exhibit The World Is an Apple: The Still Lifes of Paul Cézanne, Morgan Meis considers why the painter’s still lifes provoked outrage in the late 19th century and why they endure as “so peculiar, so specifically Cézanne-ish” today:
Cézanne liked his painting surfaces rough with paint. He generally did not varnish or glaze his paintings. He also didn’t care much for “correct” perspective. Look, for instance, at The Kitchen Table (1888-90). The left corner of the table doesn’t even match up with the right corner. And the floor of the kitchen doesn’t recede properly into space. Cézanne didn’t care. He wanted the painting to look this way. He wanted you to feel – when looking at the painting – slightly off-kilter, like the canvas can’t quite hold what is inside it and the kitchen might spill forward out of its frame.
Cézanne also liked to blur lines and boundaries within his paintings.
In Apples and Cakes (1873-77), there is a green object, probably an apple, at the back of a white dish of fruit. The apple is the exact color as the wall behind the table. So, it looks as if the wall, in the background, has simply bled into and become part of the bowl of fruit in the middle ground. In Still Life with Seven Apples and a Tube of Paint (1878-9), Cézanne has scraped at the apples with some sort of knife, mixing the colors and boundaries of the middle apple into the apples next to it. In Still Life with Carafe, Milk Can, Bowl, and Orange (1879-80), the carafe barely exists, since it merges into the colors and shapes of the wall behind it and the other objects nearby. Many things seem to be merging in Cézanne’s paintings. Objects merge with one another. Background and foreground merge. Space itself seems to tighten and overlap.
It is as if Cézanne painted still lifes to show that individual objects sitting on a table are not individual objects at all. Sure, an apple is just an apple. But in Cézanne’s still lifes, an apple isn’t just an apple. It is also all the other apples. And it is the table and jug and the pitcher and the wall behind the table. Every object is implicated in every other object. To look at one object you have to look at all the others. To confront one individual thing, you have to confront a whole world.
(Image: The Kitchen Table by Cézanne, 1888-90, via Wikimedia Commons)
The Dish 
