4: Cezanne and the Aesthetic Statement
Paul Cezanne1
The Basket of Apples, c. 1890-1894Oil on canvas, w80 cm x h65 cm (31.5" x 25.6")
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL USA
Another way still life can be used: to embody aesthetic ideas2. Above is a painting by Cezanne, a Post-Impressionist obsessed with finding a truer way to depict how we actually perceive the world. So, for example, he played around with showing multiple perspectives at once (look at the two sides of the table), with color applied in flat patches to show how light moves around a form (look at any specific apple, or the bottle), with brushstrokes that were small, flat, and repetitive to help emphasize that plane-driven sense of form, and so on.
To state the obvious, that painting up top is not actually *about* apples. There's no symbolism, no narrative. So all that's left for it to be about is sight, and Cezanne's search for an authentic way to see and to paint. In this way, his still life paintings especially become like mini-manifestos for what his entire career was 'about'.
NOTES:
1. I have to confess something: I'm a bad, bad artist, and I don't actually like Cezanne. Respect, sure — I see why he's important, and there's a lot that I do enjoy about his work. But his paintings make me feel like I'm seasick, or walking with one leg shorter than the other, because everyone says the compositions are "balance through imbalance" but almost every one of his works feels *so close* but so frustratingly unfinished or 'off' to me. I love abstraction, and don't have this problem with later cubist paintings or other 'fractured'-type works. Just with his. And it's maddening.
2. For another famous example of this, Van Gogh's sunflowers. To be clear, it's not that such paintings are necessarily meant to be aesthetic statements. But in still life, since the objects themselves are not 'important' outside of the artist's decision to paint them, and so aren't such a distraction, the artist's personal sense of style and purpose really moves into focus.