Green pot and tin kettle FWN 709 1867 – 69 63cm x 80
The soul of empires is the imposition of social order through dominator hierarchy, the pyramid of power. This soul permeates the whole structure – politics, culture, economics, and social life. And so, in the world-view of Europe at the time, paintings were classified in a hierarchy too, with the highest being graded by subject matter: The Emperor, a depiction of God, or a biblical scene would be right up there, and the excellence of the painting would be judged by the accuracy of the depiction. Right down the bottom of this particular hierarchy was still-life painting. Why would anybody want a painting of a French Golden Delicious Apple hung in their stately mansion!
Cezanne owes much to Manet and Pissarro for this painting: the knife jutting out over the edge of the table (designed to create the illusion of space between the objects on the table, and the canvass) is an old Manet trick, which Cezanne uses lots of times more in later paintings. Manet, of course, would have added a touch of class by including a brioche, or a whole salmon on the table; Cezanne, the Provencal peasant, sticks to the simple things of life! Cezanne had spent a few days at the invitation of Guillemet with a few of the crew, including Pissarro, who had just the year before finished a similar still-life. It is obvious that Cezanne copied the Pissarro painting. Cezanne had done this before; indeed Pissarro encouraged Cezanne to copy so as to develop his style. More generally, the Impressionists moved away from inanimate still life painting, where-as Cezanne continued producing them: nigh on 200 still lifes throughout his life – 12 in the 1860’s, 75 odd in the 1870’s, 40 odd in the 1880’s and another 70 or so in the last 15 years of his life.
It was in January 1906 (Cezanne died on 23rd Oct ’06) that Roger Fry, the famous artist, art critic and writer, saw this painting and was convinced that Cezanne was a genius. It was Roger Fry who would be responsible for bringing the genius of Cezanne’s work to the UK. Fry was born in 1866, and went to Paris in 1892 to study art (his first degree in the UK was in biology) Strangely, Cezanne and Roger Fry never met. Indeed Fry was, up until he saw this painting, rather dismissive of any of Cezanne’s paintings, and the Impressionist movement as a whole. Fry saw the paintings over a good 10 year period, but dismissed them. Then, the light dawned, and he loved them! Great tracts have been written to explain why this should be the case – stuff like, well, he never visited the right gallery, he was interested in other painters, and so on – somehow, not convincing stuff; and it seems to me that if we examine it through the lens of Integral Dynamics, we can have a more satisfactory explanation: at each level of development, there is a particular ‘view’ of how the world is, and our view is limited to the world view of the stage of development that we are at. We simply do not see stuff that is beyond our world-view. There’s nothing stopping us extending ourselves beyond our current world view, but we have to work at it, and usually there has to be some ‘dissonance’ to make us uncomfortable, and move us on (no pain, no gain!). Fry, obviously, born before Integral Dynamics was discovered, hasn’t got the terminology, but puts it like this: “By some extraordinary ill luck I managed to miss seeing Cezanne’s work till some considerable time after his death (even Fry himself is trying to find an explanation for his blindness!)….But I gradually came to realize that what I had hoped for as a possible event of some future century had already occurred…. I expected to find myself entirely unreceptive to his art. To my intense surprise, I was deeply moved.” From that moment on, Fry became what we may call an apostle of Cezanne, and his writings reveal not only how moved but how stimulated he was, and remained, by the encounter with Cezanne’s work: Fry’s world-view had changed, and what a new panorama now unfolded before his eyes
Back to the painting itself: I invite you to gaze at it for a moment or two………You could be forgiven for thinking that the objects in this painting have ascended, and float on the tablecloth, above the table. They somehow sit serenely still, balanced, but not by weight nor size; not imposing nor dominating, but neither reticent nor withdrawing – just there, where they should be; in their rightful place! (technical term in art is “mise en place”) And wow, they have a grace, a simplicity and a nobility which is so right and solid and powerful, as to challenge the very idea of dominator hierarchy itself.
“I want to conquer Paris with an apple” said Paul Cezanne.
“Cezanne communed with them. He understood them from the inside. He raised Still Life to such a point that it ceased to become inanimate… he was endowed with the gift of divining the inner life of everything.” Kandinsky