Three Apples (Deux pommes et demie)

Three Apples (Deux pommes et demie) from 1878, at the Barnes Foundation, is a minimal composition in which Cézanne reduces the still life to its barest essentials — a small number of fruit objects arranged on a surface, with no other elements to distract from the formal investigation. Albert C. Barnes, who assembled one of the world's great Cézanne collections, understood these intimate works as equal in importance to the large, complex arrangements. Three apples give Cézanne three slightly different color statements — each fruit differently oriented, differently lit, differently placed — demonstrating the variability within apparent repetition.

The extreme simplicity of the composition — three fruit forms on a plain surface — concentrates all formal interest on the modeling of each apple as an independent volume and the relationships between them. The spare arrangement reveals Cézanne's method with maximum clarity.