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Still Life With Skull Essay

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Still Life with Skull by Paul Cezanne was completed in 1898 during the Post-Impressionist era commonly known as the final period. The piece features a skull, fruits, and a piece of white cloth placed on a table. It takes the vanitas genre of art, done using oil on canvas measuring 65.4 cm by 54.3 cm which is exhibited at the Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania, USA (Lindsay 1969, 23). This work represents a powerful and essential link between the materialistic artistic movement of Expressionism and the ephemeral features of Impressionism. The painting features a dark background with planes of color used in the foreground and on objects to create space and depth of perspective. Texture is used to create a tonal harmony devoid of tactile or sensual appeal, therefore portraying volume.
However, Cezanne leaves little room for color and volume to play their great roles as light diffuses to the balanced tints of ochre. Space is created by the absolute stillness of the piece thereby affirming the painter as a great master of composition, color, and design. Further, the piece features complex fields that create an abstraction by the artist’s sensitive and repetitive brushstrokes. Cezanne is portraying the complexity of man’s visual perception …show more content…

The quill, writing materials, and journals are reminiscent of moral messages and the closed book is a show of knowledge formerly held by the skull. The mature fruits depicted on the painting by Paul Cezanne symbolize abundance and fertility, which is figuratively used to mean well-being and wellness. The flowers on the background mean folly and mortal sin of laziness (Platzman 2001, 116). The glasses are representative of vanity, as is the reflection shown on the still life with a skull and writing quill. The empty glass is a symbol of death and fragility of human life. The bottle may also be a sign of the sin of

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