Jorella Andrews: A phenomenological take on Paul Cezanne

Hi Jorella, to start things off, can you quickly explain how you came to study Merleau-Ponty?

I really came to the study of art theory through art practice, so I originally studied fine art and then I actually worked in the world of media, so I worked in video production. And then I returned to art theory with a massive interest in ambiguity as a thematic. And it was that interest in ambiguity that brought me to the work of Merleau-Ponty.

I’m sure many people will never have heard of phenomenology. Would you mind just explaining what it is exactly?

Phenomenology is a branch of philosophy that focuses on the world of the experience and particularly the world as it reveals itself to consciousness. And so, for some phenomenologists, they were still thinking in quite an idealistic way in the sense that consciousness is something that is quite rarefied, it’s very much linked with a disembodied idea of thought but for someone like Maurice Merleau-Ponty who was active between the late 1930s and the early 1960s – he died in 1961 – he was really interested in this notion of consciousness being embodied. So, he’s moving away from that shift between disembodied mind and embodied… you know… the body. He’s seeing bodies as thinking entities and not only human bodies but other sorts of material assemblages as having a kind of thoughtfulness and he’s wanting to open that space up and encourage us to enter into that. So, with phenomenology, you’re not thinking about how the world could be or should be, you’re really trying to observe and enter into how the world is presenting itself to us now, and for that reason, the most important phenomenological method is description, which is often regarded quite dismissively as not actually accomplishing anything. But description is absolutely vital because as you describe, you are sort of entering into the world of the thing that you’re looking at and inevitably that process begins to kind of undo the expectations that you might have brought. And with that, you can see how applicable that is not just with becoming more intimate with a particular work of art but also with another person or a group of people, so you can see where kind of the political and social advantages of a practice like that, you know, where they might really come into play.

So, with this in mind how does Merleau-Ponty as a phenomenologist relate to Cezanne’s artistic practice?

If you read the essay for which he is very well known – Cezanne’s Doubt – he would argue what he wanted to do was uncouple the appearance of Cezanne’s work including his self-portraits from a kind of autobiographical reading where the painting is a symptom of the artist’s sort of inner sense of self. And what he wants to do is think very much about doubt or insecurity or whatever it might be, thinking about that much more as having to do with the painterly quest that Cezanne was on because when he was painting, whether it was painting himself or painting a landscape, he was very interested in, I would say, a way of painting that allows paint, and colour, and line, and those sorts of forms to take the lead and out of those forms of mark making which you could, at first sight, appear to be very unstructured, very unclear, allowing something to emerge from that and that is quite an insecure way of working. You’re not plotting and kind of demarcating figures and objects. You’re working in a way that will eventually allow those sorts of objects, faces, and figures to take form in the process of painting. So, it’s a way of working that carries a lot of uncertainty with it and that’s what Merleau-Ponty was interested in. You know, he was seeing Cezanne’s quest very much a kind of philosophical one but as philosophical, in a very materialised way.

Does Merleau-Ponty approach Cezanne’s work and outlook from a specific angle in his essay and does he focus on any particular material?

The essay starts off with him criticising biographical readings that position Cezanne as mentally deranged and disturbed. And he positions the difficulties of Cezanne in terms of his quest, this painterly quest that he has, and he doesn’t know quite what it is. And what he does more is think about the kind of transitions in his work, the sense that he’s been looking at the works but he’s drawing a lot more on the sorts of things that Cezanne might have said himself about the process and he’s also doing some comparative work. Looking at the way in which Cezanne’s work was kind of departing from some of the other conventions and what he’s also doing is, you know, referring to and he’s in conversation with some books on Cezanne that would have been published at the time. You know, looking at sort of Cezanne’s use of space and things like that. So, he’s very much positioning himself between a whole range of materials.

And finally, Jorella, what does Merleau-Ponty write about Cezanne’s stylistic development over the course of his career?

So Merleau-Ponty, a lot of the time is less interested in paintings per se, he’s not an art historian but he’s interested in what Cezanne had to say about the processes of looking and making. So, often that’s what he’s drawing on as a philosopher. And, when it comes to this he talks very interestingly about the stylistic development in Cezanne’s work and he talks about it very much in material terms like he, for instance, talks about this moment after Cezanne has been working, connected with the Impressionists, and that’s been really important for him. Particularly working very closely with Pissarro. But then, increasingly what you see in Cezanne’s use of paint and his mark marking, and what you also see in his writing, is that Impressionism isn’t doing it for him because Cezanne has this abiding interest in structure, underlying structure, and there’s that kind of expression really, this idea that what – Merleau-Ponty – what Cezanne is trying to do, is to almost refine the object underneath the kind of impression. That the Impressionists are so interested in. So, yeah, and one of the things that Merleau-Ponty does is he looks at the way in which Cezanne uses colour. He looks at his colour palette and the way in which that is so very different from what the Impressionists were using and it’s that sense of you know, what makes the difference for Cezanne quite often is the materiality, the application, out of which a different sense of the world then emerges in the work itself.