sometimes against the grain of the medium, evocation of the studio in the content, com- put on display. For all of his centrality to the oscillating constantly between the spare and position, and genre of still life; second, modernist tradition, Cezanne's project has barely there and layered webs of stroke upon the artist's process of painting and drawing, always been extraordinarily difficult to char- stroke, between the faintest whisper of tint, which takes place in the studio. Indeed, it acterize: this study, and the exhibition that exquisite in its restraint, and a full concert looks at Cezanne's work in light of the two goes with it, will undertake to do so, not from of color, rich in baroque sensuality. And meanings of the word studio, of which the on high, but from an up-close, interior van- between the pencil and the palette, for Still English word study is a variation: study, as in tage point. It will start with and return to its Life with Blue Pot and its companions also working space (with all that is found within centerpiece, Still Life with Blue Pot, setting it engage the viewer in the duet of color and it), and study, as in act of working; studying; in relation to other still lifes and other sub- line, playing upon and yet undermining the producing etudes, sketches, or studies. Thus jects, to oils and to watercolors, and working traditional distinction between the two this exhibition attempts to show how both in and out of it in four close-study cam- while confusing and complicating the linear the contents and the procedures of the studio paigns: first, the biography of objects; sec- sequence from drawn armature to the were confronted in the space of the studio ond, the landscape of still life; then, picture fleshing-out of a work in paint that goes with and how the studio mattered as much to and sketch; and finally, pencil lines and that distinction. Cezanne as the plein air motif. It includes watercolors. These are its opening lines; we Recently it has been argued that the examples from all three periods—early, will end with Cezanne's finishing touches. Fauve painter Henri Matisse took the artis- middle, and late — of Cezanne's watercolor tic and philosophical distinction between career, in order to show how his attitude the drawn conception and the colored real- toward the objects and processes of the studio ization of a work of art and inverted it in changed, loosened, and fundamentally shifted his mature oeuvre: something of the same over time. At the same time it focuses on may be said of Cezanne's late work in still life the last, Les Lauves, period of Cezanne's pro- 9 and watercolor. Thus the second half of this duction, between 7902 and 1906, when his study will involve us in a close examination watercolor output was the richest and his still and even collaboration in the process of lifes in the medium the most numerous, the drawing and painting and the colloquy most adventurous, and the most "studious," between them that Cezanne's watercolors according to the double meanings suggested such as Still Life with Blue Pot increasingly above. This was also the period when, most engage in. And like the story of still life, the people agree, Cezanne came into his own process ofwatercolor will spin a yarn rather in oil and in landscape and achieved, not more humanly interesting, and certainly a dissolute old-age style, but rather his very more subtle, than the legend of Cezanne the best work, without which he would not have golden calf of modernism. garnered the status of grand (if peculiar) old An exhibition of still lifes in watercolor master of modernism that has been granted 10 and graphite has grown up around Still Life him. It is the more poignant, distaff side of with Blue Pot. Called Cezanne in the Studio, that late labor, the part of it that took place the exhibition examines two aspects of indoors and in watercolors, and without Cezanne's relation to the atelier: first, the regard for posterity, that this exhibition will 5 OPENING LINES