Cézanne: That Pedestal
This
drawing happened the wrong way round. I was looking at a Cézanne still
life and scribbled this diagram of the composition onto the back of an
envelope. A few weeks later the diagram, lying on the desk, floated
into consciousness. And all of a sudden, there it was: the reason for
Cézanne‘s off-centre pedestal. It had to
be off-centre or else he’d have had to repaint the fruit entirely,
moving the main weight to the right. Instead he moved the pedestal to
the left, under the centre of gravity. This was a kind of eureka moment for me, and I pass it on as a Christmas present to my (rare and much appreciated) readers.
Much
has been written about Cézanne‘s composition, which somehow works in
spite of oddities like this. Or rather, this way of looking at it helps
to explain why his
composition works so well. In this case, I'm proposing that the
off-centre pedestal was not random or arbitrary, and that it was not a
vague device “to strengthen the composition”; and further, that Cézanne
was not consciously inventing a revolutionary school of painting.
Rather, I'm saying that he moved the pedestal because everything on
earth is subject to the law of gravity, and it suited his pictorial
purpose better to move the pedestal rather than to move the fruit.
This completes the thought about Cézanne‘s pedestal which was originally mentioned in a discussion about
the artist's intention.
(Edited Jan 10, 2007 -- rephrased and cut but the meaning not changed)