Nature morte au panier de fruits

Look at the table. The top tilts up toward you as if it cannot decide which way it lies, the basket leans, and the near edge disappears behind a cloth only to reappear slightly out of line on the other side. None of this is carelessness. Around 1888 Cezanne was quietly abandoning the single fixed viewpoint that European painting had trusted since the Renaissance, letting different parts of a tabletop be seen from slightly different angles at once. He built these arrangements over days, apples and pears going soft while he worked. Within 20 years younger painters in Paris, Picasso and Braque among them, would take this same idea and pull it apart into Cubism.