Still life with bottles and apples 1898

Editor: This is Paul Cézanne’s "Still Life with Bottles and Apples," painted in 1898. It’s such a familiar composition, but something about the tilted perspective makes it feel…unsettling, almost radical. What do you see in this piece that I might be missing? Curator: The disruption of perspective you observe is precisely the point. Cézanne wasn’t interested in passively representing reality. He actively interrogated it. Consider the apple – such a loaded symbol. What does the fruit represent in the history of art? Editor: Well, there's the obvious reference to temptation and the fall. But also abundance, maybe a touch of vanity… Curator: Exactly. Now, how does Cézanne engage with that legacy? By disrupting its easy consumption. Look at how he treats the surface, not as a mimetic window, but as a constructed plane. This refusal of illusionism challenges the viewer. He resists conventional composition and ideas around gender and the feminine by representing the objects plainly instead of with sexual innuendo. What political consequences might this shift entail? Editor: It feels like a deliberate pushback against established norms. He is deconstructing our expectations of art as passive, decorative, or purely symbolic. Curator: Precisely. He forces us to question the very act of seeing, of consuming images. What does it mean to represent “still life” when life itself is in constant flux, and when representation itself can become a form of oppression? Think about it in terms of class as well - what are the semiotics of displaying consumable goods for those that cannot afford them? Editor: I never considered Cézanne in that context before. It gives me a lot to think about in relation to contemporary still life painting. Curator: It changes everything when you view it through the lens of social power, doesn’t it? These objects, this space, these apples – none of them are neutral.