Towering above the other objects in Paul Cézanne’s “Still Life with Oranges and Apples” from 1895–1900 is a wine bottle. There it stands to the left of the frame, dominating the display of comestibles and asserting a curious authority. It is a tribute to thirst amidst the spread of plenty.
Cézanne’s painting is one of the great tributes to sustenance and inspiration. I once bought a bottle of malbec just because it featured Cézanne’s painting on the cover. Although it was an Argentinian wine, as so many of the best malbecs are, it stimulated my memory of what malbec means and where it originates. The purple grape from the Bordeaux family began in French vineyards before being an Argentine varietal. Its purplish hue and inviting darkness are there to be seen in Cézanne’s cylindrical shaft.
The depiction of wine bottles in painting are signs of what an artist takes into his life as part of daily habit and frequent pleasure. Cézanne respects its shape and importance as part of the geometric constants of his lifestyle—of our lifestyles, too.
An esteemed art critic paying tribute to Cézanne’s composition noted that the series of still lifes featuring wine gave consistency to Cézanne’s vision of the objects in his world. The wine bottle was noted as a formal theme, the chief whose shape was less complex than the apple and orange yet strong in the composition because it could not be withdrawn from it.
Cézanne, as always, was commenting on visual perception and analyzing the process of sight, recognition and appreciation, whether it was in his own painting and sketches or even in the commonplace items of daily living. Turning fruit into wine is a scientific process as well as an artistic process with nearly Biblical reverence. Coming from Cézanne, it is a ponderable suggestion of life cycle—as is the image of fruit and wine.
The man-made object is, for Cézanne, as admirable as the natural fragrant orbs. The 1895 wine bottle has been wonderfully described in art textbooks: “Its stem, off-axis to the right, shifts the whole away from exact alignment with the important point of meeting of two curves.” Cézanne understood that the vessel that gets people tipsy could also gives his painting balance.
