帷幔、水罐与果盘

Cezanne painted this still life around 1893, spending the effort on a jug, a fruit bowl, and a heavy tablecloth that most painters would have knocked off in an afternoon. He was after something harder than a pretty arrangement. He wanted to build the objects out of colour and small shifts of plane, so the table tilts, the fruit sits slightly wrong, and yet the whole thing holds together with a weight you feel more than see. That patient, almost architectural way of looking is what the next generation seized on. Decades after his death, in 1999, this canvas sold at auction for about 60 million dollars, at the time the highest price ever paid for a still life, which tells you how much later painters came to prize exactly this kind of slow looking at ordinary things on a table.