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Cezanne admired the Impressionists, especially Pissarro and Renoir, and derived inspiration from them; it is hardly possible to imagine his landscapes of the 1870s without their quantum of Impressionist freshness. But the whole thrust of his work is about something other than the delight in the fleeting moment, the "effect" of light, color and atmosphere, to which Impressionism was dedicated. Underneath the delectable surface was structure, like reefs and rocks beneath a smiling sea, and that was what Cezanne sought and obsessively analyzed--the bones and masses of the world. His famous remark about seeking in nature "the cylinder, the sphere, the cone" need not be taken literally--he was never a geometric painter, still less an abstract one, though later abstractionists would build on his work. And yet his greatest paintings bear abstract constructions of tremendous amplitude and sureness.
One example among many is Woman with a Coffeepot, circa 1895. One would need to go back 400 years, to Piero della Francesca's Madonna del Parto, to find a painted human figure of such monumental gravity. All is volume, all is power, not only the large masses--the head that seems hewn from some skin-colored rock, the torso and the flaring blue pyramid of the skirt, the cylindrical coffeepot and the cup with the spoon set vertically in it--but also the microforms, such as the knot tying the woman's apron at her waist, which has the finality of a turned lock. The poetry of this image isn't in expression--it is almost ineloquent--but in space, form and immense deliberation.
Early Cezanne the stumblebum turned into one of the finest manipulators of paint who has ever lived. Perhaps manipulator is the wrong word--it suggests trickery, whereas in Cezanne the relation between the paint surface and the imagined surface of the object (a rock, the side of a house, an apple) is astonishingly direct and candid. This doesn't come across in reproduction. It rises from the paint itself, that discreet paste in which every trace left by the brush seems to help create the impression of solidity, so that you feel you could pick the apple--which is both a rosy sphere of light and a ball as heavy as plutonium--off the table. And yet the surface is never closed, never overdetermined; that is part of the magic.
In the magisterial Still Life with Curtain and Flowered Pitcher, circa 1899, the heavy leaf-pattern curtain on the left and the folds of white cloth below it have the same sculptural density as the fruit and the jug, with its exquisitely suggested peony design. But there, on the right, Cezanne has another white cloth, its folds sharper and more geometrical, its surface unfinished, so that you see glimpses of table through it--and the balance is suddenly perfect, despite but actually because of this shift of gear. Then there is the play between mass and instability--how the fruit in the dishes is so grandly solid, while the plates themselves tilt just enough to convey an underlying peril. The relationships in a still life were as infinite to Cezanne as those in a landscape: "These glasses, these plates, they talk among themselves," he wrote to his friend Joachim Gasquet. "Interminable disclosures."