Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Plaster Cupid, c.1894, oil on canvas (Courtauld Gallery, London)
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Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:06] We’re in the Courtauld Galleries, and we’re looking at “Still Life with Plaster Cast.” It dates to the middle of his career.
Rachel Ropeik: [0:11] 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. If you look toward the background, then all of a sudden, is that the floor, or is that a piece of drapery? It’s hard to unify.
Dr. Zucker: [0:34] 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.
[0:52] But what Cézanne seems to have done is to actually accentuate the turn of his body, which becomes a kind of axis for the entire painting. And then something even more interesting happens, which is that as you move back you see a series of stacked canvases.
[1:02] Perhaps a stretcher bar of a canvas that’s facing away from us, a canvas seen in 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 which is…
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:00] A giant piece of fruit.
Dr. Zucker: [1:18] …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 spatial depth.
Rachel: [1:30] It then completes the circle around the painting by bringing your attention back to the foreground that you’ve been tipped back into. And 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 connected back to the fruit on the table in the foreground.
[0:00] So it does make the composition complete.
Dr. Harris: [1:56] Everything seems to be shifting slightly. The cupid figure, as you said, seems to twist, or Cézanne exaggerates that twist. The figure in the back that’s part of a painting, I presume…
Dr. Zucker: [0:00] That’s rendered, right.
Dr. Harris: [2:07] …seems to be moving. If you look closely at the outlines of the fruit, they seem to slightly shift. Nothing seems to be stable. Everything is in flux.
Dr. Zucker: [2:15] What kind of intentionality is in back of this? Why in the world would Cézanne want to do such a thing? It’s such a complicated and problematic rendering and space. 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. That line continues up and picks up the opposite hip of the putti. Then the groin picks up the edge again of the canvas.
[2:56] There’s this whole series of almost Degas-like intersections that play fast and loose with our expectations of space.
Rachel: [2:59] Which clearly points out that it’s not that Cézanne didn’t know what he was doing by mixing all these points of view and twisting everything around. It was a conscious artistic choice. This is still a carefully composed image, even though it’s not necessarily how we traditionally think of a still life.
Dr. Zucker: [3:15] 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?
Dr. Harris: [3:36] Is it insane to be thinking of Matisse’s “Red Studio” right now? This is an artist’s studio. And we have stacked canvases. We have images that the artist is working on, pieces of still life. We have a canvas that’s unified by a close-to-single tonality — blues with some reds and greens.
[4:00] But 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 Cézanne because it seems so much about space, construction, and shape.
Dr. Zucker: [4:08] Although some art historians — I’m thinking Meyer Shapiro — certainly bring the personal in through the forms in the still life, I would suspect that Matisse was working through issues that Cézanne 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.
[4:37] Do we actually construct space as we move through it? Is space, in fact, a much more subjective and constructed set of issues as opposed to the ideal architectural understanding?
Dr. Harris: [4:42] 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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Frans Hals, Portrait of Rene Descartes, 1649, oil on canvas, 19 x 14 cm (Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen)
René Descartes
I want to raise Cartesian philosophy here. The word is capitalized because it refers to the philosophy of the proto-Enlightenment thinker René Descartes. Even if you have never heard of this great rationalist, it is likely that you will recognize one of his phrases such as “I think, therefore, I am.” This odd sentence is the result of his effort to find irrefutable proof that he actually existed. Philosophers often ask questions that are meant to reveal fundamental truths. Can you imagine for a moment asking yourself this very question–How can I actually prove that I exist? Descartes realized an elegant solution, his very ability to ask the question was the proof of independent consciousness and therefore, of his existence.
With such questions, Descartes raised many considerations that would shape the modern world. Sometimes these questions raised, in turn, conclusions seemingly at odds with each other, such as his skepticism of both perception and of self-evident assumption.
Objective and subjective knowledge
Ironically, such thoughts would eventually lead to a reappraisal of our confidence in society’s scientific empiricism. Empiricism relies upon objectivity. You will remember that the word “objective” means a truth that is beyond personal experience. In contrast, the word “subjective” is directly linked to personal experience.
Here is an example. Imagine a minor accident between a taxi and a city bus. A patrolman comes along to reconstruct the event. Does he only ask the cab driver what took place or does he also ask the passenger in the back of the cab and the bus driver and the riders on the bus? The cop’s goal is the reconstruct what “actually” happened. But if we take a post-Cartesian position we might ask whether there really was a single actual (objective) event or whether there were actually multiple (subjective) truths, each the result of each witness’s perspective. Let’s take a more directly applicable example. Look about the room that you are currently in. It probably has six sides: four walls, a floor, and a ceiling. When an architect drew a diagram of your room, he/she would have conceptually stepped outside of the space so that it could be understood in total.
But is this objective view a false one? Now in the built room, you cannot see its totality in a single moment. We can only see bits and pieces of the room at any one time and must rely upon memory to understand the room as a whole. Your more subjective experience has historically been considered less important than the architect’s objective conception even though you experience directly and the architect knows the room only theoretically.
Cézanne and subjective experience
Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Plaster Cupid, c. 1894 oil on canvas, 70.6 x 57.3 cm (Courtauld Gallery, London) (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Regarding the traditional hierarchical relationship between objective and subjective, Cézanne seems to ask, “which is more true?” and his conclusion mirrors an important development of modernism. In Still Life with Plaster Cupid, it is the subjective view that constructs the space. Cézanne has placed a plaster cast (copy) of an ancient Roman sculpture of a cupid (the son of Venus) on a tabletop so that it dominates the composition.
To an artist of the 19th century such classical sculpture would refer to the great humanist triumph of the Greeks and Romans and the birth of naturalism. In fact, one of the most prominent features of such sculpture would be its contrapposto (you remember this: axial shifts responding to weight borne by one leg). Actually, Cézanne’s li’l god-ling is also twisting at the waist, creating a subtle spiral torsion. Again, the space is odd, the floor especially, seems to rise up too steeply with the stacked canvases forming its uneven perimeter. Have you noticed that the canvases that line the floor, shape the space of the room and that this “shaping” is related to the twisting of the cupid? Let do this point by point. The right foot of the sculpture points roughly towards us and aligns, more or less, with the receding orthogonal of the table. The figure’s hips have turned. They are aligned with the plane of the canvas at the extreme left that is partly hidden behind the blue tablecloth. The Cupid’s shoulders are turned even further and align with the canvas that rests behind the godling’s torso.
Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Plaster Cupid (detail), c. 1894 oil on canvas, 70.6 x 57.3 cm (Courtauld Gallery, London) (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
This is clearly not the objective space of the architect. Cézanne has clearly sought to match the perception of space to the movement of the the body. But isn’t that what we really experience? When you walk into a room, do you see the room as an objective whole? No. We can only see a fragment at a time. But as we’ve already established, we don’t actually see in fragments; we see continuously and space is shaped by our continuous movement through it. Try it. Focus on any straight line in the room you are now in. Lean forward, and as you might expect, the angles of the room shift. In Still Life with Plaster Cupid, we see Cézanne’s attempt to render true human vision, vision that is subjective, continuous, and informed by memory.
