Still Life with Apples

This still life attests to Matisse’s admiration of Cézanne, and particularly of his manipulation of spatial relationships. It contains many of the objects typically found in Cézanne’s still lifes, and replicates his signature rupture of planar space and presentation of objects that seem unmoored and inconsistently dimensional. Recent technical examination reveals that Matisse adjusted and changed the main color oppositions of background and tabletop, eventually choosing gray and blue, as he did frequently during this period of his career. Evidence of his previous experimentations with color, especially a reddish-brown hue, is visible in the valleys of the large drying cracks that can be seen throughout. Many of Matisse’s paintings from this era contain these cracks, which occurred when he did not wait for a layer of paint to dry completely before painting over it.