Milk Can and Apples

Paul Cézanne, 1879–80 · Gallery 518 · Floor 5

So... something's wrong with this table. Take a second. Try to find it. There it is. The tilt. The whole top sorta tips up toward you, steep enough that the apples should be in your lap by now. The milk can just stands there like the table is level. Does that look level to you? This is Cézanne. Milk Can and Apples. Around 1880. Now try to figure out the spot you're seeing it from. The tabletop, you're looking down on from up high. But the apples, you're seeing almost from the side, like you pulled up a chair. And that front edge runs flat across the bottom. The angles don't quite agree. And perspective had rules... Ya know... Centuries of them. Cézanne said he copies nature "while interpreting it." He died in 1906. A year later, Paris put on a big show of his work. A young painter named Georges Braque had already been painting at L'Estaque, near Marseille. Cézanne's old territory. Which is why he picked it. The next summer, Braque goes back. Paints houses packed together, walls and roofs pressed into geometric blocks. And the walls don't agree on an angle either. Sorta what this table does. Then he sends those landscapes to a Paris exhibition. The Salon d'Automne. The jury turns them down. That guy Matisse is on the jury. So a dealer shows them instead. And then a critic complains that Braque has reduced everything to cubes. Houses, landscape, the lot. The insult sticks. Cubism. Now look back at the table. Years later, Braque explained what bothered him about the old perspective. It starts from one spot, he said. And never leaves it.

▶ Listen on Listen to Frank

Also in Gallery 518