Still Life with Coffee Cups, 1912

Crammed together like blueish-white and sand-colored houses in a Mediterranean coastal town, pots, jugs, cups, and fruit are assembled on a table in this Still Life with Coffee Cups of 1912. It is not the precise depiction of individual objects but the modeling of a complex landscape of light colors that is in the center of this work. Anton Faistauer (1887–1930) translated the design and composition principles of his idol since childhood days, Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), from landscapes to the bourgeois still-life motif of the set table. The Cézannean lightness of painterly touch is countervailed by the heavy, shining solid-wood tabletop and the hastily done dark red-brown and undefined background, which brings the work closer to traditional oil paintings of past centuries. The mystery of this picture probably lies in how it strikes a balance between these opposites.

RR, 2021