Cezanne - The Basket with Apples
...n the wooden block, but also supported by the bottle placed next to the basket. The bottle, a vertical object, has an assertive quality. It defies gravity in its upward thrust. The arrangement is obviously an invention of the artist. “The basket with apples,” with its shifting planes and brushwork, possesses a sense of potential movement. The viewers’ eyes follow the implied line of the falling apples. Starting from the basket’s handle and following along the green, then the yellow apples, and along the scattered apples on top of the cloth we can see a diagonal, which suggests motion. Another diagonal by which Cézanne implies a sense of motion in his painting is the diagonal line starting from the mouth of the bottle and ending in the pear at the right front corner of the table. Cézanne also achieves motion by using shifting planes of color, which are freely associated and at the same time contrasted and compared in the top of the table. Another detail that suggests motion is the complex folds of the drapery. The directional lines that Cézanne uses in his painting also help direct the viewers’ eyes along the different objects, and from object to object. “The Basket with Apples” has an asymmetrical composition. The bottle is positioned near the vertical axis, dividing the composition in two. The basket with apples is the bigger and heavier object in this composition, which situates the visual weight in the left side of the painting. Not only the color and the size of the basket, but also the texture make it visually heavier than the smaller, lighter and smoother form of the dish in the right side of the composition. Although the painting has asymmetrical composition, Cézanne has managed to achieve a great balance and equilibrium using various directional lines—the tilting of the bottle, the inclined basket, the foreshortened lines of the breads, and corresponding to these three tilted forms, the lines of the tablecloth converging to the lower edge. Moreover, the objects in the left side of the painting are darker, bigger, and “heavier” while the objects on the right side are smaller and “lighter.” However, Cézanne has placed fewer apples on the left side and more on the right—the different quantity of apples in the two sides of the painting contributes achieving balance, too. The only two vertical objects in the painting are the bottle and the pear at the end of the right front corner of the table. They are also placed in the two different sides of the painting—the bottle is located to the left of the vertical axis and the pear, which is diagonally positioned from the bottle, is located to the right of the vertical axis. By putting the only two vertical objects of the painting in the two different sides of the painting, Cézanne achieves a better balance. In “The Basket with Apples” Cézanne, uses open palette, or polychromatic colors. Cézanne brings into play simultaneous contrast. He places two complementary colors, red-orange and green, next to each other. This makes both colors to seem more brilliant—red seems redder, and green seems greener. Green placed next to red-orange pushes the object forward so, the green apples look like they are standing out from the rest of the apples. The colors that Cézanne applies are robust, luminous, and clear. In this composition, Cézanne uses size and color to emphasize the basket with apples and draw our attention to this part of the painting. The colors in the larger objects—the basket and the bottle, are darker and tempered, which helps for drawing our attention to the left part of the painting. For t...