Seeing The Gardener Vallier: Cezanne and Merleau-Ponty's Aesthetics of Doubt

This article looks closely at one of Paul Cezanne'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 Cezanne's artwork and thought are stitched into the structure of Merleau-Ponty's aesthetics in his essay "Eye and Mind," for Cezanne'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 Cezanne's vision manifested in his portrait of Vallier further to see where the painting as well as Cezanne himself stand in relation to the visible world.