Still Life with Apples and Oranges

Around 1899, Paul Cézanne set up a table piled with apples and oranges, added a decorated white pitcher, and draped everything in loose, crumpled cloth. The result seems ordinary enough at first, but the longer you study it the stranger it feels. Surfaces tilt at odd angles, the bowls look like they might slide off the table, and the whole scene sits just slightly out of balance. Cézanne did this on purpose. He was toying with the idea of showing objects from more than one viewpoint at the same time, ignoring the rules painters had followed for centuries.

The real magic lives in how he handled his brush. Instead of blending everything into a smooth, lifelike finish, Cézanne built each piece of fruit from small blocks of warm color, so the reds and oranges seem to pulse against the pale folds of fabric. He cared less about copying nature exactly and more about capturing the sheer heaviness and presence of things. Younger painters noticed. Picasso and Matisse pored over works like this, and the early ideas of Cubism are already stirring in it. A humble bowl of fruit, it turns out, helped push painting into the modern age.