"What I have not yet attained, what I feel can never be attained in figure and portrait, I have perhaps touched upon here... in these still lifes" (Paul Cézanne). Together with the landscapes, Cézanne's 170 still lifes form the quintessence of his art. Paul Cézanne - Still Lifes is the first monograph on this famous group of works. The book not only closes a surprising gap in research, but also corrects earlier interpretations of the artist's creativity. Instead of reading Cézanne's still lifes as psychoanalytic reflections of the self or variations on the essential core of natural things, Friederike Kitschen interprets them as problem studies at a turning point in art history. The seemingly private artistic world of the still life is the stage for such central themes of modern art as the relation between pictorial representation, perception, and reality; Cézanne's confrontation with the historical context - his public, optics, art criticism, theories of environmental determinism - has left a decisive mark on the formal qualities of these works.