Write a critical note on 'Still Life with Onions' of Cezanne.
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Answer:
From the same period as the anti-architectural, festive Still Life with Oranges and Apples, perhaps a bit earlier--the exact dates of Cézanne's works are not known--is this still life which combines the large constructive elements, the verticals and horizontals and the broad, bare wall, with a close-packed abundance of small curves, tilted forms, and accents of free vegetation. In the cool tones and search for rhythmic lines, it is like the Bathers, though less schematically composed. The rounded and flamboyant shapes also articulate the severest, most stable objects, as in the scalloped edge of the table and the outlines of the bottle and glass. It is one of Cézanne's most remarkable compositions, an ingenious development of lines in a musical manner, without drama or climax, and has an amazing delicacy of touch and refined richness of color within a subdued, atmospheric key. Meditative in mood, a result of the most serious meditation, it is a work to ponder and explore.
As a formal theme, the chief element is the onion, a shape more complex than the apple and congenial to Cézanne's later style through its greater flexibility of line and especially its more open, wavy form. We follow its development from left to right in groups open and closed, including the variant lemons, in ever-changing axes, spottings of color, and contacts with neighboring things. Together with the scallops of the table--an ambiguous pairing of concave and convex, of greater span than the similar curves of the onions--the billowing silhouette of the cloth, and the bottle and glass, they form a system of distinct parallel melodies which at certain points coincide.
The painting has many delightful, subtle touches; perhaps every stroke is of the same order of finesse and it is arbitrary to single out one rather than another. We may note, however, several examples within the same part, the beautifully painted wine glass. Its stem, off-axis to the right, shifts the whole away from exact alignment with the important point of meeting of two curves of the scalloped table edge below--curves related to the form of the glass stem and the base of the bottle. Through the shifting of the stem, and through the break in the outline of the ellipse in its upper left, the glass seems finely tilted, like certain of the onions with their pliant ends, and strengthens the diagonal grouping of the bottle, the glass and the onions in the plate. Another delicate, barely perceptible thought are the horizontal lines drawn inside the glass (and also the bottle); they are a discreet recurrence of the line of the table and belong with the horizontals on the lower right of the wall and an exposed bit of the table among the folds of the cloth; together, all these segments form a stepped series, with proportioned intervals. The glass itself, with the refracted onion behind it, is an amazing bit of sober painting in which the decisions, touch by touch, have an inspired daring and rightness; it could be painted thus only here, in relation to the unique structure of this harmony which it helps to constitute.
An Italian artist, admiring the subtleties of Velasquez's Las Meninas, called it the "theology of painting." The same may be said of this great still life of Cézanne.
Answer:
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Paul Cézanne Still Life with Onions - Musée d'Orsay