塞尚把颜色混在一起，自己刷上油漆，把自己的工作室墙壁漆成了深灰色。工作室里的每一个物体，都被巨大的北窗照亮，似乎被背景的灰色所吸收。在物体的边缘周围没有明显的反射。所以没有什么能把它们和背景分开。迈耶罗维茨突然看到塞尚是如何用那个他画笔一样的小刷子，从一个物体移动到背景，又从背景移动到物体上，没有像文艺复兴那样的视觉错觉。最终，塞尚成了“平面”的**个声音，这是现代思想的**个说法，即一幅画只是在一幅平坦的画布上画，仅此而已。这是他为自己的想法所做的一种环境，在这种环境下，光的演奏是一种特别的灰色，不像荷兰内部的黑暗，但是，这是一种更精确的键控背景，它可以让一个苹果的红色和灰色背景的相等值之间进行交换。这是一种色调相近的建议，对平面概念的欢迎。Meyerowitz把塞尚的每一件物品都放在手中，以灰色墙为背景看着他们，摄影师设法说服了工作室的主任让他做这件事--很久没有人碰过这些东西了——出于某种原因，她同意让他按照自己的意愿去做。他的冲动是把每个物品都放在他大理石桌面上的同一个地方，然后做一个“愚蠢”的记录。Meyerowitz看到它们就冲动，就像他们要放回桌子上的架子上一样，所以他决定在每一排5个物品，共5排——Meyerowitz的帽子作为中心——看看他们放在一起时现实尺寸时的感受。他立刻就被这些人吸引了。

Cézanne painted his studio walls a dark grey. He mixed the color and painted it himself. Every object in the studio, which was illuminated by a vast north window, seemed to be absorbed into the grey of the background. There were no telltale reflections around the edges of the objects. So there was nothing that could separate them from the background itself. And Meyerowitz suddenly saw how Cézanne, making his small, patch-like brush marks, moved from the object to the background, and back again to the objects, without the familiar intervention of a renaissance- like illusion of perspective. After all, Cézanne’s was the first voice of ‘flatness,’ the first statement of the modern idea that a painting was simply paint on a flat canvas, nothing more. And here was an environment that he had made to serve his idea, in which the play of light on this particular tone of grey - which was not like the darkness of Dutch interiors - but was a more precisely keyed background hum that allowed an exchange between say, the red of an apple and the equal value of the grey background. It was a proposal of tonal nearness that welcomed the idea of flatness. Meyerowitz tooke each of Cézanne’s objects in hand and look at them against the grey wall, and the photographer managed to convince the Director of the Atelier to let him do this - no one had touched these objects in ages - and for some reason she agreed to let him do as he wished. His impulse was to place each one in the exact same spot on his marble topped table and just make a ‘dumb’ record of it. Meyerowitz had the impulse to see them in rows, almost as if they were back on his shelf above the table, so he decided to make a grid of 5 rows with 5 objects on each row - with Cézanne’s hat as the centerpiece - and see what they felt like when seen together at approximately life size. He was immediatly drawn to them at this scale.