Still Life with Flowers and Fruit

Still Life with Flowers and Fruit from around 1888, at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, belongs to Cézanne's fully developed mature period, when the systematic approach he had been developing since the early 1870s was working at its highest level of sophistication. By 1888 he was producing the most spatially complex of his still-life arrangements, and the combination of flowers and fruit in this composition created the particular formal dialogue between the two types of organic growth that interested him: flowers with their complex petal structures and varied directional angles, fruit with its simpler spherical or ovoid forms. The Alte Nationalgalerie, which holds major German holdings of nineteenth-century European painting, acquired this Cézanne as part of the institution's recognition that French Post-Impressionism was central to the history of modern art. By 1888 Cézanne was working in near-complete isolation in Provence, his reputation almost entirely unknown outside a small circle of admirers that included Pissarro, Renoir, and the younger Symbolist generation who were beginning to understand the importance of his approach.

Cézanne built form through disciplined, parallel brushstrokes applied in systematic patches, constructing volume and depth without conventional chiaroscuro. His palette is cool and considered — ochres, blue-greens, muted earth tones — while his fractured perspective.