Paul Cézanne's apples
HAPPY NEW YEAR
I can't resist new projects. My latest is derived from my new diary, which is not, strictly speaking, a diary, but a book. It's called A Year in Art and consists of a double spread for each day of the year with a painting and a quote and the date. Hence it's use as my diary for 2017. My project is to look into each picture a little, learn about it and it's creator and maybe the time in which it was created. Page one - January 1 - is the beautiful painting above - Still life with a Curtain which was painted in 1894-5. But in spite of the title - it's the apples that are the thing really.
"With an apple I will astonish Paris." Paul Cézanne
By Paris he meant the official art world of Paris of course. Cézanne painted 270 still lifes featuring apples over the course of his career, so it was obviously a subject dear to his heart. And apparently he told the people he painted to "be an apple" as they posed. Below are three examples.
So I set out to learn a little bit about Cézanne and his apples - and as usual I have been very superficial in my research, but I did learn a few things, some of which I half knew before, some of which were new to me. And I hope my year of art will continue to teach me. Don't worry I shan't inflict it on you all - just when it has to do with food perhaps. And it's yet another coincidence is it not that I recently wrote about a photograph of an apple?
Which is also very apposite because one of the things that I was interested to hear was that, of course, at the same time as Cézanne and his fellow artists were revolutionising the art world, the photographers were setting up shop. So questions were being asked about why one needed artists when you could have a photograph - because art, prior to this period, had been largely realistic - photographic in its detail on occasion. I guess it's sort of obvious, though I had not really thought about it before, that impressionism, pointillism, post-impressionism and everything that followed on from this was an attempt to do something different from photography. The impressionists were interested in light. Cézanne was interested in structure, shape, colour. His colours are vivid, his shapes flat yet alive. You can see the flat splashes of colour from his palette knife, and yet the general effect is of a round three dimensional object. There is movement in these still lives. One of the videos that I watched pointed out that often the objects were not quite straight - and now that I look at our subject painting I see that the jug is slightly tilted, as is the table and also the plates of apples, whilst the tablecloth is full of movement as it almost writhes across the table top. The curtain too - the leaves are almost 3D and moving out of the material. And is it the same curtain, and the same jug and the same tablecloth in the first picture in my mini gallery?
The original of the featured painting is in the Hermitage museum so I am unlikely to ever see it unless it tours the world as part of an exhibition that eventually comes to Melbourne. Always possible. So I don't really know what the painting looks like. I just have the reproduction above - and if you look on the net you will find several different versions - well it's the same painting but the colours are slightly different - something to do with the reproduction process no doubt. So I don't really know what the true colours of the painting are, which may well alter how you see it, what you see in it. Another example of the differences between painting and photography and the relationship between the two. So I will end with a photograph - the man himself. Wow.
