Still Life (Nature morte)

Still Life (c.1893) at the Barnes Foundation belongs to the most critically celebrated phase of Cézanne's still-life achievement — the complex multi-object arrangements of the early 1890s that directly challenged conventional still-life conventions. By 1893 his still lifes were being discussed by the Nabis painters in Paris as foundational works of a new visual language: Maurice Denis had famously formulated the principle that a painting before being a horse, a nude, or an anecdote was fundamentally 'a flat surface covered in colors assembled in a certain order.' Cézanne's still lifes were the principal demonstration of this principle. The 'mere' arrangement of apples, cloth, and ceramic objects on a tilting table was being understood — by the small circle who had access to his work through Vollard — as a more radical pictorial proposition than anything the Salon was producing. The Barnes Foundation's concentration of Cézanne's still lifes across the decades allows this 1893 canvas to be studied within the full development of the genre in his oeuvre.

The still life components—fruit, vessel, cloth—are organized through a complex spatial distortion that synthesizes multiple viewpoints. Table surfaces are subtly tilted, objects described through adjacent color patches of varying temperature. The white tablecloth is built from dozens of colored patches of cream, blue, and warm grey.