CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/4/2017

A photographer's revelation in "Joel Meyerowitz: Cézanne's Objects"

Look familiar? Featured images are reproduced from Cézanne's Objects, color master Joel Meyerowitz’s new collection of photographs of the objects that Cézanne left behind in his studio when he died of pneumonia in 1906. “A few years ago during a visit to Cézanne's studio in Aix-en-Provence,” Meyerowitz writes, “I experienced a flash of insight about the artist that I saw as intrinsic to his becoming the father of modern painting. Once having seen it, it inspired me to move in a new direction in my own work. Cézanne painted his studio walls a dark grey with a hint of green. Every object in the studio, illuminated by a vast north window, seemed to be absorbed into the grey of this background. There were no telltale reflections around the edges of the objects to separate them from the background itself, as there would have been had the wall been painted white. Therefore, I could see how Cézanne, making his small, patch-like brush marks, might have moved his gaze from the object to background, and back again to the objects, without the familiar intervention of the illusion of space.”