The World is an Apple: The Still Lifes of Paul Cezanne

This ground-breaking volume offers a reappraisal of Paul Cézanne's achievement in the genre of still life. It examines his paintings within the context of his artistic development and professional self-fashioning, and probes the shifting scientific and critical discourses that shaped both his practice and the reception of his pictures.A prolific artist who synthesized formal problems through a close study of objects, Cézanne's lifelong engagement with still life painting yielded what is arguably the single most innovative body of work in the genre of any artist in the Western canon. In their often radical coloring and skewed perspective-and abetted by his highly demonstrative paint application-Cézanne's still lifes unmoored objects and their meanings from conventional representation, effectively recasting the physical and perceptual relations between people and things.