(jazzy music)
Male: We're in the Courtauld Galleries
and we're looking at Still Life of Plaster Cast.
It dates to the middle of his career.
Female 1: I do think it's a little bit hard
to find one point of view that works
for this whole painting.
If you look at the table in the foreground
with these fruits and this little plaster cast,
then that seems to have been painted from one angle,
and if you look toward the background
then all of a sudden it's is that the floor
or is that a piece of drapery?
It's hard to unify.
Male: Okay, so maybe we should start in the foreground.
We have this plaster cast of a putti,
of this little angelic figure; no arms.
He's rather cute.
He's a little elongated and he's in
a kind of contrapposto so that he's actually moving.
What Cezanne seems to have done is to actually
accentuate the turn of his body, which becomes
a kind of axis for the entire painting.
Then something even more interesting happens,
which is that as you move back, you see
a series of stacked canvases,
perhaps the stretcher bar of a canvas
that's facing away from us, a canvas seen
at an oblique angle just in back of the putti's back.
We can actually make out a figure on the upper right.
Then there's a piece of fruit.
Female 1: A giant piece of fruit.
Male: Which is on the floor, perhaps?
Or is it a ball?
It seems to come forward.
What that does visually is it pushes
the entire canvas up and forward in the back
and really denies any kind of spacial depth.
Female 2: It then completes the circle
around the painting by bringing your attention
back to the foreground
that you've kind of been tipped back into.
Also, because the subject of that painting
that we see a little bit of in the background
is facing back towards us, and we have the fruit
on the floor, maybe, which is kind of connected
back to the fruit on the table in the foreground,
so it does make the composition complete.
Female 1: Everything seems to be shifting slightly.
The cupid figure, as you said, seems to twist,
or Cezanne exaggerates that twist.
The figure in the back that's part of
a painting, I presume.
Male: That's rendered, yeah.
Female 1: Seems to be moving.
If you look closely at the outlines of the fruit,
they seem to sort of slightly shift.
Nothing seems to be stable.
Everything is in flux.
Male: What kind of intentionality is in back of this?
Why in the world would Cezanne want to do such a thing?
It's such a complicated and problematic
rendering and space, and there are alignments
that make it even more quirky.
For instance, if that's an onion, a very large onion bulb,
in the lower left, just in back of the putti's feet,
the skin of the onion seems to end
and the green starts just at the line
where we see the floor end.
That line continues up and picks up
the opposite hip of the putti,
and then the groin picks up
the edge again of the canvas.
There's this whole series of almost Degas-like
intersections that play fast and loose
with our expectations of space.
Female 1: Which clearly points out that it's not
that Cezanne didn't know what he was doing
by mixing all these points of view
and twisting everything around; that it was
a conscious artistic choice, and this is still
a carefully composed image, even though it's not
necessarily how we traditionally think of a still life.
Male: For instance, the table being at the angle
of the foot that comes towards us, but I'm seeing
as the hips turn in a sense space turning as well
as defined by the canvas in back of it.
Then is it possible that the face is aligned
even with the canvas in back of that
so that the reality is constructed
by the figure within it?
Female 1: Is it insane to be thinking
of Matisse's Red Studio right now?
This is an artist's studio.
We have stacked canvases.
We have images that the artist is working on,
pieces of still life, and we have a canvas
that's unified by a close to single tonality
of blues, with some reds and greens.
There's something about, perhaps, an interpretation
of the space of the artist's studio
from a more personal point of view,
although it's hard to read the personal into Cezanne,
because it seems to much about space
and construction and shape.
Male: Although some art historians,
I'm thinking Myra Shapiro, certainly
bring the personal in through the forms in the still life.
I would suspect that Matisse was working
through issues that Cezanne is raising here
and in other canvases of this time,
with the dismantling of space,
but I think they have to do, really,
with the subjectivity of the viewer in space,
and do we actually construct space as we move through it?
And is space, in fact, a much more subjective
and constructed set of issues as opposed
to the sort of ideal architectural understanding?
Female 1: You can see why the Modernists
of the early 20th century would pick up on this
because there's something even in a way
more radical in this reassembling of space.
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