Cézanne’s wine bottles (Part 2 of 3)
Almost 100 years ago, Paul Cézanne painted “Blue Pot and Bottle of Wine,” now on view in the collection at The Pierpont Morgan Library. Though oil on canvas, it has the hurried tentativeness of a sketch. The longer you stare at it, taking note of its incompleteness, it becomes a picture of expectancy. It is a portrait of thirst.
In 1902, Cézanne might have been painting the atmospherics of café living and the sensuous pleasure of quaffing. The painting’s almost hazy, inebriated images are unstable. The sketchy look has a gelatin-like shiver—it suggests the very opposite of a still life.
On the left is a blue pot surrounded by not fully realized earthenware. Immediately to its right a group of orbs, some in yellow-shaded contours that suggest lemons, spill out across the table. A butter knife stops the spill; it lies next to the eponymous wine bottle. Only one-third full, the bottle indicates the picture’s strongest sense of life. Ingest has happened here.
Cézanne could be commenting on the experience of wine-consumption through this sketchy image. He captures the translucence of the glass as well as the volatility of the bottle’s purplish contents. Light surrounds the objects, bending and folding the blue pot and yellow lemons as if tossed in a kind of visual sangria. It’s the idea of wine that is in the making.
“Blue Pot and Bottle of Wine” achieves its post-impressionist quality from the strange fact that its imagery seems unfinished, not fully digested. The aftermath of drinking and dining are vividly depicted in Cézanne’s ingenious impression of the comestible moment. It’s a portrait of life in anticipation of drunkenness. It would make a perfect label for a crisp bottle of Vouvray.
