Still Life with Onions

Cezanne painted this in the late 1890s, working slowly, as he always did, from a table of ordinary things: a handful of onions, a bottle, a glass, a knife and a white cloth. Look at the tabletop and something is quietly off. The bottle stands square and upright, but the surface it sits on tilts up toward you, as if seen from higher up. Cezanne is showing the same objects from more than one viewpoint at once, letting the round onions swell into real weight. He spent years on still lifes like this, treating a few vegetables as seriously as any grand subject. Younger painters in Paris studied exactly this, and Cubism grew partly out of that tilted, many-angled table.