A talk presented in the Terrain Gallery of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, 141 Greene Street  (in SoHo), New York City, as part of the series "Art Answers the Questions of Your Life!" -- based on the historic principle stated by Eli Siegel: "All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves."

       Here we see vegetables and domestic objects, like those I have used and put away without much thought. Cézanne found a meaning in them people all over the world have been stirred by. In "The Organization of Self," a chapter of Self and World, Eli Siegel explains that people separate the wonderful from the matter-of-fact, and he writes: 

When Cézanne paints a common fruit he does not add to that fruit qualities which the fruit does not possess; he sees the fruit accurately -- with unrelenting accuracy; nevertheless, through his accuracy a something beyond the fruit, a wonder beyond the vegetable is presented. Familiarity and wonder must be, and have been present in all true aesthetics. 

[Self and World, Definition Press, NY, pp. 136-137] 

          Each object in this painting, each onion, has its own particular shape, definite and contained -- yet every object, the curve of every onion, meets and joins the other objects; the colors change and continue; energetic, disorderly green and brown shoots come forth form the onions almost as if they were feeling out their relation to each other and the tablecloth and space. This is a "still life" -- yet it is like a waterfall, a cataract of shapes and colors spilling across the table and over its edge.

        I didn't like confusion, bustle in life -- I wanted peace and calm. I liked my antique store because things didn't move and bother me! I'll never forget being asked in an Aesthetic Realism consultation if I was a "meaning robber." I didn't see that shapes, colors, the relations of objects had energy. Cézanne sees the wonder in the relation of rest and motion in familiar things.

        The upright bottle is a staunch sentinel over this unruly bunch of vegetables-yet closely examined, its outline wavers, blurs with the air. The rim of the glass literally vanishes into air, mysteriously, as it reveals, blends with and changes the onion behind it. I learned my notions of romance -- dim lighting and "mystery" -- made for boredom, because they arose from a desire to manage and dismiss other people and objects, which is contempt for reality. Cézanne saw the true wonder of how things meet in this painting -- how matter and space become each other.

        As an example of Cézanne's beautiful justice to objects, look at the foremost onion on the dish. Cézanne wants to give this onion its full existence, its full depth and weight. This is what we want and need to give to other objects and to other people. Through brushstrokes that look so spontaneous and rough, yet are so careful and delicate, Cézanne builds subtle layers, from vivid red-orange, to gold and white, to a luminous pinkish-orange. We feel the depth of this onion is tangibly there, as its surface radiates with light. We see the outline of this onion indicated on the right, yet through the colors within we feel a continuation of that roundness of shape in every bit of surface, until on the left it seems there is no outline at all, just color as form. It is breathtaking. Meanwhile, it is more beautiful through its relation to all the other onions, the white dish and tablecloth, the dark knife, glass and bottle -- and it brings out their beauty in return. 

     Everyone can learn from Aesthetic Realism what Cézanne shows through these objects: that seeing how we have the structure of the world in common with everything and every person will make us energetic, alive. I am so grateful this happened to me.