Some years ago, while working on a book commission about Provence, Joel Meyerowitz visited Cézanne’s studio in Aix-en-Provence. While there, he experienced a flash of understanding about Cézanne’s art. Cézanne had painted the studio walls a dark grey, mixing the color himself. Consequently, every object in the studio seemed to be absorbed into the grey of the background. There were no telltale reflections around the edges of the objects, so there was nothing that could separate them from the background itself. Meyerowitz suddenly saw how Cézanne, making his small, patch-like brush marks, moved from the object to the background, and back again to the objects, without the illusion of perspective. After all, Cézanne was the original voice of “flatness.”
