projecting movement around it. Then, they graph the symmetry of that central object, with two apples in front and one apple on each side of the white pot At the same time—with each of their slightly different distances from the center point of the white pot—they serve to indicate the departures from symmetry that accompany any act of perception, any movement of the eye across and around objects, no matter how smooth and perfectly formed: the departures from symmetry that distinguish between the inani- macy of ideal, Platonic shapes and the Detail 2 animate bodiliness of real, sensate entities, between abstract concepts and material less, navel-less, stemless apples are barely them closer and closer together, filling the things that one sees, grasps, and eats—or distinguishable from peaches, oranges, gap between them, until they almost touch at least wants to see, grasp, and eat—and plums, or even onions. They are barely apples, each other. And now look at the other two that Cézanne drew with a trembling, bodily but rather spheres, ever so slightly distended, apples, the leftmost one nestled securely in hand, warping perfection with desire. The and in that too they chart the territory its bed of white cloth, cradled between four apples also serve to map out relations between the general idea and the particular the two other objects, while the one at the between positive and negative spaces— sensation of the apple. right is more subtly balanced, ready to roll between the convex and the concave, be- The handle of the white pot appears just off the flowered tapestry at the slightest tween masses and crevices, hills and hollows, barely to touch the third of those four apples twitch of its imaginary folds. There is even an the space that describes objects and the (just as the handle of the blue kettle behind it arcing fold in the tapestry just beneath space between and around objects, between, appears just barely to touch the very tip of that apple, which suggests the trajectory of in short, the presence and absence of objects. the hilt of the white pot's lid—of its apex or its future fall. Further, the four apples help to diagram its nipple, depending on whether one wants But there are seven—or even eight— the difference between different degrees of to think of it as a geometry or a body), thus apples: what of the other three—or four? overlap and separation, between rectilinearity marking a confrontation between an arc Paler and more distant, they are harder to (the milk jug) and the curve, between the that is empty, slicing through air and shadow, see —placed at the fictive back of the com- two-dimensional (the napkin) and the three- and an arc that is full, full of the flesh and position, it is as if they are unripe, in the dimensional, between the blank white of skin of an apple, as well as between the cold painterly sense. Without much color—they the paper and the volumetric illusion that is of blue and the warm of gold, and between are almost all white ground, so that it is created upon it and that is condensed in the optical and tactile sensations. And finally, hard to describe that white as a highlight apples'white highlights, between warm and those four apples stake out the threshold anymore—suffused in some sort of still-life cool coloration, as well as between simple between stillness and movement, balance and version of atmospheric perspective, they sphere and more complicated shape. Without imbalance. Look at the two foremost apples, seem not fully painted and therefore not quite names attached to them, these four dimple- whose repeated contours appear to move ready to be seen yet, certainly not ready to 46 CÉZANNE IN THE STUDIO