Still Life with Flowers and Fruit

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Still Life with Flowers and Fruit: Paul Cezanne

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Paul Cezanne Oil Painting - Still Life with Flowers and Fruit

Keywords: Life, Flowers, Fruit

Work Overview: Still Life with Flowers and Fruit
Paul Cezanne
Date: 1890
Style: Post-Impressionism
Period: Mature period
Genre: still life
Media: oil, canvas
Dimensions: 65.5 x 82 cm
Location: Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany

In the 1880s, Cézanne’s work centered around still lifes. He produced over 170 paintings in this genre, with the same elements but rearranging them in order to arrive at new formal and painterly answers. A wooden table, a tablecloth, fruits, and a ginger jar were all items in his standard repertoire, with the addition here for the first time of a generous bunch of wildflowers — daisies, carnations, and poppies. None of Cézanne’s other still lifes are so rich in decorative detail, yet the space retains its simplicity of character, and the work retains its formal rigor. The opulence of the right-hand side of the image is balanced by the dark background and the cool, white tablecloth. The individual objects are sensually portrayed and relate in a somewhat monolithic manner to each other and to the picture space. They are an expression of Cézanne’s search for the being of things, which in itself comes through particularly in his style of painting. The surrounding space is divided into planes, but each is alive in every detail — permeated, dissolved, and reconstituted. The colours are of an infinite richness and vibrate in the juxtaposition of finely gradated light values and tones. The picture is notable for its cool, harmonious colour chords — green, yellow, and violet or red, white, and blue. Cézanne’s constant rearrangements were made in an attempt to grasp and understand the objects. He consciously chose the diffuse light of the studio in preference to bright daylight in order to emphasize the sheer physicality of the objects. The objects in Cézanne’s still lifes, whether for daily use, artificial, or natural, are detached from their normal function. Cézanne’s still lifes reflect his recognition that there are laws governing the world and the portrayal of its complexity.

This magnificent still-life shows Cézanne at his most fulfilled and fulfilling. Here the ginger jar, pears, and flowers, all placed on a turbulent swirl of tablecloth, bespeak a world of both fixity and change, where the ceramic's immutability stands in dramatic contrast to the passionate, organic vulnerability of the fruit and the frail, short-lived flags of waving flowers. Like Matisse, Cézanne returned to the most abundant, extravagant Dutch and Flemish Baroque still-lifes as a point of departure for his own.

A wooden table. On the table lays a snatched up table cloth with yellow and green pears scattered on it. On the right edge of the table is a light blue braided glass jar with a handle, in which a more lush bouquet of summer flowers such as red poppies, white margaritas and other garden flowers lies. The separation of shades of colours is noticeable in the background. It’s divided into two parts: the left: an almost black, lightless part and the right: the light part. The light half suggests a door to the outside or window nearby. The intense occupation with the theme still life – Cezanne painted over 170 of them, they portrayed the same contents, just in another arrangement – makes Cezanne’s attempts to pierce the facets of objects, natural or artificial, obvious. He relieves them of their normal function and constantly presents them in a new fashion. Cezanne preferred to underline the pure condition of the body itself, by diffusing the light in his studio.

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Paul Cezanne

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