Pyramid of Skulls

Four human skulls are stacked in a tight pyramid on a tabletop, lit with stark, sober clarity, their hollow sockets confronting the viewer directly. Cezanne, increasingly preoccupied with mortality in his last years, returned often to the skull as subject, but rarely so frontally and grimly as here. Now in a private collection, the Pyramid of Skulls is among the bleakest of his works - the traditional vanitas reduced to its barest, most unflinching form, the structural rigor of his art turned to a steady, almost meditative contemplation of death itself.