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Cézanne's Doubt and Phenomenology of Perception Essays by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Cézanne's stylistic approaches and beliefs regarding how to paint were analyzed and written about by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty who is primarily known for his association with phenomenology and existentialism. In an essay entitled Cezanne's Doubt, written in 1945, Merleau-Ponty discusses how Cézanne gave up classic artistic elements such as pictorial arrangements, single view perspectives, and outlines that enclosed color in an attempt to get a "lived perspective" by capturing all the complexities that an eye observes. He wanted to see and sense the objects he was painting, rather than think about them. Ultimately, he wanted to get to the point where "sight" was also "touch". He would take hours sometimes to put down a single stroke because each stroke needed to contain "the air, the light, the object, the composition, the character, the outline, and the style". A still life might have taken Cézanne one hundred working sessions while a portrait took him around one hundred and fifty sessions. Cézanne believed that while he was painting, he was capturing a moment in time, that once passed, could not come back. The atmosphere surrounding what he was painting was a part of the sensational reality he was painting. Cézanne claimed: "Art is a personal apperception, which I embody in sensations and which I ask the understanding to organize into a painting." In an another essay, entitled "Phenomenology of Perception", Merleau-Ponty delves deeper into the relationship between perception and body movement and how they are inseparable. What does that have to do with Cézanne, let alone Art? It is through Cézanne that developed this theory. Because he believed that by braking away from the tradition of linear perspective Cézanne was successful in painting a more truthful perpective. Namely one that relates vision to the placement of the body in a context.

https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/download/attachments/73535007/Phenomenology+of+Perception.pdf “”