Fruit - Paul Cezanne

Painting Detail

Fruit
Artist: Paul Cezanne
Medium: Painting, Oil on canvas, 45x55.3 cm
Date: c. 1879
Genre: Still Life, Fruits
Source: State Museum of New Western Art, Moscow, 1948

It is hard to overemphasize the importance of still life paintings in the work of Cezanne. The world of ordinary objects attracted the artist with the potential expressiveness of three-dimensional forms. Although the theme recalls the still lives of the Old Masters, with its china, napkins and fruits, unlike those painters Cezanne was indifferent to texture, seeking to bring out in each element the concrete form and mass of the object. The very simplicity of the forms gives them a strange unity. Placing the objects such that they did not hide or detract from one another, Cezanne ensured that each expressed its full significance. Each object has a stable, unchanging colour, the blue tinge suggesting a certain thickness to the air. Rejecting Impressionism, Cezanne sought to capture not the passing moment but the expression of the permanent and the eternal.