for Cubism, the next step after Post- 3 Impressionism in the modernist lineage. And this in spite of the many modern admirers of Cezanne's watercolors, not to mention the evident descent of Picasso's and Georges Braque's early Cubist still lifes straight out of Cezanne's work in that genre.4 And in spite of the fact that the work chosen to represent Cezanne's genius and celebrate his status as a modernist saint in Maurice Denis's 1900 Homage to Cezanne (fig. 1) was precisely a still life, Still Life with Compotier of 1880 (fig. 2), which figures as well at the center of Roger Fry's pivotal 7927 mono- graph on Cezanne. Fry, indeed, argued for the centrality of still life as a genre, devoting a fifteen-page chapter to the subject, some Figure 1 leisurely pursuit, the lady's flower or land- nine pages of which were spent on Still Life Maurice Denis scape jotting, not the matter of high value, with Compotier itself.5 Fry the Bloomsbury (French, 1870-1943) 2 formalist saw still life as the keystone of public esteem, complex craft and finish. Homage to Cezanne, 1900 Usually dependent on immediacy, brevity, Cezanne's work precisely because of its Oil on canvas, 180 x 240 cm and a quick, sure touch, watercolor defies the inconsequential subject matter: he argued 1 (70% x 94 /2 in.) layered labor of oil painting. Like still life, for the "purely plastic significance of still- Paris, Musee d'Orsay it tends to be relatively small in size. Like still life," the greater evidence of the artist's R.F. 1977-137 life, it has something of the feminine about "handwriting" in the painting of unpreten- it. As with still life, moreover, its subjects are tious objects, and the unconscious but telling generally of low standing. And as with still "deformations" that show up in this lowly life, so with watercolor: it is neither that genre more than in others. "In still life,"he genre nor that medium that we think of when said, "the ideas and emotions associated with we think of Cezanne as the titanic figure who the objects represented are, for the most inaugurated the great and storied struggles part, so utterly commonplace and insignifi- of the modernist tradition. We are more apt cant that neither artist nor spectator need to think of works like his late, great Bathers, consider them. It is this fact that makes the executed in oil on canvas, huge in size, still-life so valuable to the critic as a gauge of redolent of myth and history, an obvious pre- the artist's personality. "6 For Fry, paradoxi- monition of such pathbreaking modernist cally, it was the very insignificance of still masterpieces as Pablo Picasso's Demoiselles life's world of modest things that made it sig- 7 d'Avignon and an equally obvious inspiration nify so purely in the way that mattered most. 2 CEZANNE IN THE STUDIO