Seeing The Gardener Vallier: Cézanne and Merleau-Ponty’s Aesthetics of Doubt

ABSTRACT

This article looks closely at one of Paul Cézanne’s portraits of Vallier painted the last year of his life to examine how his (“fugitive”) vision works through his use of colors. The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who in his phenomenology views the body as the primary locus of having and therefore knowing the world, emphasizes the vital role of the body of the artist that must be offered to the world in order to truly manifest the world in painting. It is no wonder that Cézanne’s artwork and thought are stitched into the structure of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetics in his essay “Eye and Mind,” for Cézanne’s painting bears witness to his own account of aesthetic experience. Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the lived vision that seeks the depth of Being, the lived qualities of the visible world, takes Cézanne’s vision manifested in his portrait of Vallier further to see where the painting as well as Cézanne himself stand in relation to the visible world.

KEYWORDS:

• Paul Cézanne
• The Gardener Vallier
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty
• phenomenology
• lived perspective

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my appreciation to Fr. Anselm Ramelow (Professor of Philosophy and Philosophy Department Chair at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology), my research supervisor, for his patient guidance and insightful suggestions inspired me to complete this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Paul Cézanne, Correspondance, ed. John Rewald (Paris: Grasset, 1978), 392, as cited in Alex Danchev, Cézanne: A Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012), 287.

2. Danchev, Cézanne, 286.

3. Hajo Düchting, Paul Cézanne, 1839–1906: Nature into Art (New York: Taschen, 1999), 169.

4. Düchting, Paul Cézanne, 169.

5. Ibid, 166–169.

6. Ibid., 166.

7. Steven Platzman, Cézanne: the Self-Portraits (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 190.

8. Ibid.

9. Cézanne to Gauguin, September 28, 1906, Letters, 91, as cited in Danchev, Cézanne, 354.

10. Ibid. Danchev says, “He wears a shirt and straw hat in three of the oils (R950, in the Tate; R953, in the Bürhle Collection; R954, in a private collection) and all of the watercolors (RWC 639–41). In the other three oils he wears a jacket, an overcoat, and a cap (R948, formerly owned by Pellerin, now in a private collection; R949, in the NGA; R951, in a private collection).”

11. Danchev, Cézanne, 355.

12. See notes 4 above.

13. Ibid.

14. Danchev, Cézanne, 354.

15. Ibid.

16. John Rewald, The Paintings of Paul Cézanne: A Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 1 (London: Thames & Hudson, Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 499. Rewald writes in regard to the self-portrait, “Yet hardly any other painter went as far as Cézanne in excluding every trace of sympathy or warmth from the reflection he was tracing. The feelings he allowed to come through in portraits of friends, and especially of his son, are absent here. The features he studied and built up on this canvas with deft brush strokes—put down slowly perhaps, but needing no corrections—were those of a man who had learned through bitter years that self-reliance and self-respect were his most secure sources of strength.”

17. Joachim Gasquet, Cézanne: A Memoir with Conversations, trans. Christopher Pemberton (London: Thames& Hudson, 1991), 132, as cited in Platzman, Cézanne, 190.

18. Ibid.

19. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 100.

20. René Descartes, Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology, trans. Paul J. Olscamp (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs Merrill, Library of Liberal Arts, 1965), 108.

21. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson, trans. Michael Smith (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 123.

22. Ibid., 124.

23. Ibid., 125.

24. Galen A. Johnson, “Ontology and Painting: ‘Eye and Mind,’” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson, trans. Michael Smith (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 48.

25. Gary Madison, The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty: A Search for the Limits of Consciousness (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981), 98–99.

26. Johnson, “Ontology and Painting,” 48.

27. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 129.

28. Galen A. Johnson, The Retrieval of the Beautiful: Thinking Through Merleau-Ponty’s Aesthetics (Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press, 2010), 27.

29. Ibid.

30. John Sallis, “Freeing the Line,” in Merleau-Ponty at the Limits of Art, Religion, and Perception, ed. Kascha Semonovitch and Neal Deroo (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010), 25.

31. Ibid., 24.

32. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 141.

33. Ibid., 143.

34. Ibid., 141.

35. Rajiv Kaushik, “Physis and Flesh,” in Phenomenology and Existentialism in the Twentieth Century: Book I. New Waves of Philosophical Inspirations, vol. 103 of Analecta Husserliana, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (London: Springer, 2009), 86.

36. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 55, as quoted in Julian Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 40.

37. Gregory B. Smith, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Transition to Postmodernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 267.

38. Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Books, 2006), 196.

39. Anthony Rudd, “Wittgenstein and Heidegger as Romantic Modernists,” in Wittgenstein and Heidegger, ed. David Egan, Stephen Reynolds, and Aaron James Wendland (New York: Routledge, 2013), 236.

40. Joseph Fell, Heidegger and Sartre: An Essay on Being and Place (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 197, as quoted in Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology, 197.

41. Felix Ó Murchadha, “Space, Time, and the Articulation of a Place in the World: The Philosophical Context,” in Spatiality and Symbolic Expression: On the Links between Place and Culture, ed. Bill Richardson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 33.

42. Glen A. Mazis, “Time at the Depth of the World,” in Merleau-Ponty at the Limits of Art, Religion, and Perception, 127.

43. Kaushik, “Physis and Flesh,” 87.

44. Johnson, The Retrieval of the Beautiful, 29.

45. Michael B. Smith, “Merleau-Ponty’s Aesthetics,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson, trans. Michael Smith (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 196.

46. Ibid. 195.

47. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 414.

48. Johnson, The Retrieval of the Beautiful, 29. See also Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, “La ‘promiscuité: Merleau-Ponty à la recherche d’une psychanalyse ontologique,” Archives de Philosophie 69(2006): 11–35.

49. Ibid. Johnson says, “the word promiscuité has a very precise meaning in French, where it refers to being mixed together with together in space that is too constrained for too long a time: too close.”

50. Ibid., 203.

51. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,”138.

52. Ibid.,140.

53. Galen A. Johnson, “Phenomenology and Painting: ‘Cézanne’s Doubt,’” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson, trans. Michael Smith (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 9.

54. John Kear, Paul Cézanne (London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2016), 170.

55. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson, trans. Michael Smith (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 63.

56. Ibid.

57. Smith, “Merleau-Ponty’s Aesthetics,” 201.

58. Hugh J. Silverman, “Cézanne’s Mirror Stage,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson, trans. Michael Smith (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 269.

59. Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s doubt,” 65.

60. Silverman, “Cézanne’s Mirror Stage,” 269.

61. Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” 70.

62. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 125.

63. Johnson, The Retrieval of the Beautiful, 62.

64. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, ed. Clara Rilke, trans. Joel Agee (New York: Fromm International, 1985), 68.

65. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 242.

66. Jonson, The Retrieval of the Beautiful, 63.

67. Ibid.

68. Ibid, 69.

69. Ibid.

70. Danchev, Cézanne, 357.

71. Danchev, Cézanne, 357. See also Jean Beaufret, Dialogue avec Heidegger, vol. 3 (Paris: Minuit, 1974), 207.

72. Kaushik, “Physis and Flesh,” 86.

73. See note 32 above.

74. Kaushik, “Physis and Flesh,” 88.

75. Ibid.

76. Kaushik, “Physis and Flesh,” 88.

77. Ibid.

78. Ibid.

79. Johnson, The Retrieval of the Beautiful, 70.

80. Ibid.

81. Ibid.

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Shin Young Park

Shin Young Park completed her doctoral dissertation in systematic and philosophical theology at the Graduate Theological Union (Berkeley, USA). She demonstrates herself as an Asian female scholar who is an insightful questioner, a dedicated researcher, and a Christian mentor. She is currently revising her dissertation for publication (under contract for 2023). The topic is a theo-aesthetic response to postmodern nihilism, with a particular focus on postmodern phenomenology, Han Urs von Balthasar’s theology of beauty, the form (Gestalt), and Christology.