be touched and grasped (detail 3). The two two or three, once they are found, these behind it and camouflaged by the surround- —or three—apples at the rightmost edge of apples of Cezanne's are seen to indicate one ing blue and gold folds of the tapestry, which the tapestry-covered surface are found of the side and back limits of the still life, is much more vivid and present than the soon enough, even though they are bled of finishing the passage from foreground washed-out apple that nestles within it. That much of the color that makes them painterly to middle ground to background, as well as apple is the least ready to be seen and fruit, and even though, for all their smallness marking the transition from sphere to warped touched, the most fragile in its watercolor of number, they are hard to count. Because ovoid ellipsis, and the confrontation, once wash of palest blue and gold, the most of the second arc in what at first appears to again, between blue and gold, though here doubtful as to its own separate existence, the be the left-hand one of them, it is hard to that confrontation is faded, a mere echo of most hesitant about its difference from the determine whether it is single or double and what happens in the foreground, and here paper space and textile surfaces from which therefore whether the group that it makes is it is condensed in the two sides of one sphere, it is supposed to emerge. That is the apple, a duo or a trio, a simple pair or the bare the hedged-in and the open, the lit and the somewhat drained of convexity by that which minimum needed to form a cluster, replete shadowed sides, like a model of the world surrounds it, that describes the condition of with the barest indication of overlap. as it turns on its axis, showing its sunlit and being behind—that is, the condition of being Bracketed off from the larger composition of its darkened halves. at the utmost distance from Cezanne's "con- which it is a part, this little group of indeter- The last apple is the hardest to find. centric" point of view, and therefore not yet minately numbered apples functions as a Finishing the circuit around the white pot, it present to his "prehensile eye, " not yet part study of the least means needed to manufac- is hidden just behind it, sandwiched in the of his curved-out world of "culminating ture the distinction between one object and no-space between the little pot and the blue points, " nor yet separate from its own ground another, to unfold the plural out of the sin- kettle, mimicking the curve of the pot's or available to the illusions either of visibility 1 gular, composition out of counting, the art of metal handle, whose empty segment seems to or oftactility, let alone to that of edibility. complicated arrangement out of the sim- contain an excess of apple pigment. It is Most of the concerns that I have so far plicity of pointing and showing. But whether mimicked in turn by the blue lump of cloth suggested are specific to still-life painting: Detail 3 47 THE LANDSCAPE OF STILL LIFE