Cézanne, Paul (1839-1906)
Nature morte à la commode (Still Life with Commode)
c.1887–1888
Oil on canvas, 63.8 x 79.9 cm
Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA
Many artists of the twentieth century credited Cézanne with revolutionizing painting through his unique style and complex manipulation of perspective, both of which are exemplified in this work. Executed in his hallmark short, small groups of brushstrokes, this scene features an interior in which three-dimensional consistency has been destroyed. This play of impossibility is epitomized in the tablecloth, of which the scholar Meyer Schapiro wrote, “It is like a mountain, a rocky creviced mass, or like some human figure, twisting and turning, with an inner balance of directions.”
Of the many still lifes Cézanne painted, he only repeated the same composition twice. This work is a cropped variation of a canvas now in Munich, showing less of the wallpaper on the left and the tablecloth on the right. Cézanne began both paintings by drawing the composition on the canvas, indicating that the arrangement of the scene was the result of careful and deliberate consideration. (Fogg)