Modernism

PAUL CÉZANNE
(French, 1839-1906)

Two Apples on a Table, about 1895-1900
Oil on canvas
Purchased with funds from the Alice Speed Stoll Accessions Trust and with funds donated by Wayne Perkey and Family, Mrs. W. L. Lyons Brown, Mrs. Harry S. Frazier, Jr., Sandra A. Frazier, Mr. and Mrs. Randall B. Hockensmith, The University of Louisville Foundation, Inc., Helen Condon Powell and Mr. and Mrs. Edmund A. Steinbock, Jr. 2000.21

The French painter Paul Cézanne is a key figure in the development of 20th-century art. The emphasis in his paintings on the geometry of nature and breaking objects into planes set the stage for Cubism and subsequent abstract art.

Two Apples on a Table was painted between 1895 and 1900. Its composition of circles, ovals, and rectangles is a study in geometry. Cézanne creates apples of remarkable roundness and solidity by deliberately building up thick, impastoed brushstrokes of paint in closely related tones and concentric bands of color. In contrast, he uses thin washes of oil paint reminiscent of watercolor for the plate. The tabletop is a patchwork of colors, while the background is a tapestry of thin parallel brushstrokes.

Cézanne’s innovative break from traditional one-point perspective is evident in the depictions of objects from simultaneous viewpoints. He depicts the top of the plate from above and the lower half from the front, giving it a slightly warped appearance. Similarly, the tabletop tilts up sharply, as if seen from above, yet the apples appear securely anchored by their intense blue and violet outlines and shadows. Despite these shifting viewpoints, Cézanne miraculously creates a believable and tightly resolved picture.

Typical of this period in his art, Cézanne has left areas of the primed canvas bare, specifically at the lower right side and bottom. His working process was intense and protracted, and once he had achieved what he wanted in a painting, he would stop, often leaving part of the canvas unpainted.

Cézanne depicts a detail from a painted screen in the upper quarter of the painting as background to the table. It effectively stops any recession into the distance and reinforces the tension between three-dimensional illusion and an emphasis on the two-dimensional picture plane. The screen’s inclusion demonstrates the artist's fascination with visual metaphors relating art and nature. He rhymes the leaves of the apple with the leaves painted on the plate and on the screen. Similarly, the form of the apple on the left, created by concentric circles of tones, echoes the flower depicted in the floral border of the screen at the upper right.

Although mainly celebrated for their revolutionary contributions to pictorial form and structure, Cézanne’s works also convey deep personal emotional meaning. Cézanne was an insecure and repressed personality, fearful of his stern father on whom he was financially dependent most of his life. He painted the screen depicted in the painting in 1859-60, reportedly assisted by Émile Zola, for his father’s study in Aix. Depicting lovers in a landscape and based on a French wallpaper design, it was Cézanne’s first painting and one that he depicted in a portrait and several still lifes.

Apples also were a subject that he returned to repeatedly, so much so that they are as closely associated with Cézanne as ballerinas are with Degas and bouquets with Fantin-Latour. Art historian Meyer Schapiro suggested that apples represent sexuality in Cézanne’s work. Cézanne remarked to Renoir, "I paint still lifes. Women models frighten me." The apples and the screen in Two Apples on a Table offer a wealth of opportunities for exploring the major emotional themes of the artist’s life.