Merleau-Ponty about le doute de Cézanne

Merleau-Ponty’s essay about Cézanne’s doubt from 1945 is still de- bated. Merleau-Ponty tries to explain the peculiarities of Cézanne’s pictorial lan- guage, for instance his abandonment of the geometrical perspective, as the expression of, what he calls, the “primordial perception”, which is free from the distortions of metaphysical dualism and modern sciences. There are two main problems here. First, primordiality remains an obscure notion, which may be explained by Cézanne’s work, rather than reversely. Secondly, Merleau-Ponty tends to forget that Cézanne’s perception is first of all a painter’s perception, inspired by the idea of what a painting should be and by a conception of the physical performances by which it comes into being. Cézanne tries to liberate painting from the Albertinian idea that a work is like a window, opening a view on a section of reality. Contrary to this, Cézanne stresses the autonomy of the work, its presence as painted – without giving up its contact to the reality depicted.