Reinventing a Bowl of Fruit

Of all the artists who have painted still lifes, Paul Cézanne (say-zahn) is arguably the most important. While others saw fruit on a table, Cézanne saw shapes. He approached painting by thinking about his subjects as geometric forms instead of fruit on a table.

Cézanne grew up in the countryside in the south of France. For a time, he lived in Paris and worked alongside other artists. But he didn’t like when his work was criticized by the art community, so he decided to return to the country, where he could work alone. There, he was able to create his own style without the influence of other artists.

When Cézanne painted his 1899 Apples and Oranges, above, he observed many geometric shapes throughout the composition. “Reproduce nature in terms of the cylinder and the sphere and the cone,” the artist wrote.

Cézanne translated each object into a geometric shape. He saw pieces of fruit as irregular spheres. He also recognized a series of overlapping planes, or surfaces, in the draped fabric. Although this still life is painted on a flat canvas, the way the fabric folds onto itself, overlapping and forming shadows and highlights, creates the illusion of three-dimensional space.

Cézanne observed this arrangement of objects from several different points of view. The pitcher is seen from the front, while the plate of fruit on the left is visible from above. Because the artist painted these objects from two different points of view, the scene seems to shift in an unnatural way. It almost looks like some of the fruit is about to roll right off the table.

The edge of the table is a diagonal line that pulls the viewer’s eye from the lower left through the space to the upper right. The hanging white fabric in the foreground interrupts this line. The patterned fabric seems to rise up in the background, closing off the scene. This arrangement of fabric adds to the unnerving feeling that the composition is moving.

In Still Life with Sugar Basin and Fruit, above, Cézanne played with negative and positive space. The positive space in this painting is made up of the table, the fruit, the fabric, and the sugar bowl. The negative space is the vast, darkened wall in the background.

Positive space is usually more important than negative space. But Cézanne makes the two equally important by painting the wall with visible brushstrokes and gradual variations in color. Cézanne has even painted the wall through the bowl’s handles with great care. The negative space has the same level of detail, and therefore importance, as the positive space.