Paul Cézanne - Still Life With Apples and a Pot of Primroses

A few years ago, the ingeniously mordant comedian Stewart Lee performed a ‘bit’ in which he talked about his grandfather’s love of eating crisps (bear with me on this – I will be coming to Cézanne shortly). As in many of Lee’s shows combining satire with ridiculousness, you wondered where he was going with a narrative, but slowly and with each recurrence of the word ‘crisps’, the funnier it became. You realised what a peculiar word it seemed, how fundamentally absurd. Of course, comedians have always known that some words are inherently funnier than others. You can google for a neurological explanation for this. Words with a ‘k’ sound in them, or other hard consonants, are often cited as having more comedic power, which is why ‘cucumber’ is a funnier word than ‘radish’, and ‘Tipton’ more bathetically amusing than ‘Cambridge’ for instance.

But Lee’s repetition of ‘crisps’ also relied for its humour on a psychological phenomenon called ‘semantic satiation’. You can divorce any word from its sense if you say it often enough because the brain begins to register the sound at the expense of its meaning, its signifying function, which somehow slips its conventional cognitive hold. Now, Cézanne is one of the least comedic people you can think of (he was considered by many to be difficult, an oddball), but I think something similar was going on in his approach to the visual world, even if humour was not his thing. But he did want to move beyond the associations we all develop, through education or simply by existing and interacting in the world, to the things we see. Or rather, he wanted to go back to registering only the sensations that came from looking without the intellectual impedimenta each thing carries. He was not interested, for example, in any of the symbolic baggage that came with a picture of apples – he was indifferent to any evocation of Eve’s temptation, forbidden fruit, the tree of knowledge, loss of innocence, or classical allusions to Aphrodite, Paris, Helen of Troy and the Golden Apple. He wanted his art to be divorced from all this and to be much more about looking and seeing. Not only did he paint apples in his still lifes multiple times, but there are also often many individual fruits within each painting, and the more you look, the more odd, even uncanny, they can seem.

For all the art-historical / theoretical analysis that it is possible to read about Cézanne’s approach to art making, it can be easy to overlook the sheer incongruity to be found when you really look at his paintings and the objects within them. And as Robert Hughes remarked in The Shock of the New, he, Cézanne, was primarily concerned with seeing, with the infinite multiplicity of ways of seeing even the humblest of objects or the homeliest of landscapes, and with the sheer relativity of what lies in front of the eyes. In other words, he brought such intense scrutiny to his environment and to the concomitant action of laying down paint, that the visual equivalent of semantic satiation went on. The French have a term for this, jamais vu, the opposite of déjà vu. By looking hard at a familiar thing in the world it can begin to look strange, even unreal even though, rationally, you know that it isn’t.

Paul Cézanne, Still Life With Apples and a Pot of Primroses, 1890. oil on canvas, The Met, New York

This painting, Still Life With Apples and a Pot of Primroses was certainly not the first or last time that Cézanne took on the subject of apples, even if as the Met blurb explains, his depiction of flowers in the same work was unusual. But it is as if the artist could never be done with probing at the same theme. Just as he painted multiple versions of Mont Sainte-Victoire near his home in Provence, so he worried away at apples too. At the same time, he was not interested so much in painting a photo-realist version of an apple – such a painting would be like saying ‘there you are, I’ve nailed it, that’s an apple for you, now let’s move on.’ He resisted the idea that any artwork could deliver the definitive version of a thing. He also wanted us to be continually reminded that paint on canvas is flat, two dimensional. But in the process of seeing, he does want to say that in one way all apples are the same but that they are also all different. He needs us the viewers to acknowledge the complexity of their painted make-up, their infinite variety. We can think that we know what the essence of an apple is, but we can never know how much they dissent visually from one another. He needed to keep probing painstakingly at an insoluble mystery, as if the elusiveness of its solution tormented him.

The brushstrokes used are mostly short and the opposite of expressive – they seem undemonstrative and searching, quite un-gestural. They convey a sense of unremitting enquiry, determination and single-mindedness. Cézanne’s art is like the continual process of reconciling the picture’s level plane with the apples’ occupation of real spatial depth – his painting is an act of resistance against hundreds of years of art education – he cancels the sense of illusionistic void and celebrates the authenticity of flatness. Even things which are flat like those two background walls, and especially the one directly in front of us with its mesmerically scumbled cobalt teal, cerulean blue and emerald, earn as much of a rightful place in the work as do the apples themselves.

The artist’s methodology was developed at a time when ophthalmologists were beginning to better understand how the eye and the brain actually allow us to make sense of the world. Although there is no evidence that Cézanne had read about the phenomenon known as ‘saccades’, the spontaneous way that the eyes make rapid, flickering movements in milliseconds from object to object (or word to word of text when reading) to make sense of it, the science of vision was becoming better understood by 1890, and Cézanne makes precognitive use of such knowledge in his own approach to art.

Seeing or vision is not the simple matter it might have seemed, but involves multiple, rapid, continual reassessment. In this painting for instance, that section of table visible on the left looks like it wouldn’t match up to that on the right and similarly, the areas of flowerpot rim seen each side of the leaves that droop from them look as if they belong to different vessels. This apparent incongruity comes as a result of focussed but subjective staring at these different sections, maybe at different times, and refusing to accept that the painting needs to show ‘true’ perspective and that seeing is never a single isolated event, but an ever-changing continuum.

Art for Cézanne came to stand for the ascendency of the picture as he crafted it, an object about surfaces that has its own painted merit. This artwork has its own auratic presence involving form and colour sensations but Cézanne, here and in much of his oeuvre, consciously nullifies the conventional judgement as to how well it performs as a window onto the recessionally spaced world. The more that world is looked at, the more its foreignness, as with those crisps, asserts itself.