In “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1946), Maurice Merleau-Ponty discusses Paul Cézanne’s portrait of the critic Paul Geffroy (1895-6), which led me to some congruent reflections.
Merleau-Ponty notes that the table “stretches, contrary to the laws of perspective, into the lower part of the picture.” In a photograph of M. Geffroy, the table’s edges would form parallel lines that would meet at one point, and the whole object would be more foreshortened. That is how an artist who followed what we call “scientific perspective” would depict the table. Why does Cézanne show it otherwise?
Imagine that you actually stood before Paul Geffroy in his study. You would not instantly see the whole scene. Your eye might settle on your host’s face, then jump to the intriguing statuette next to him. The shelves would at first form a vague pattern in the background. Objects for which you have names, such as books, would appear outlined, as borders filled with color. On the other hand, areas of the fireplace or wall would blend into other areas.
You would know that you could move forward toward M. Geffroy, in which case the table would begin to move below you. Just as you see a flying ball as something moving–not as a round zone of color surrounded by other colors–so you might see the table as something that could shift if you moved your body forward.
A photograph of this real-world scene would be a representation of it, very useful for knowing how M. Geffroy looked in his study, and possibly an attractive object in its own right. But the photo would not represent anyone’s experience of the scene. Instead, it would be something that you could experience, rather like the scene itself, by letting your eye move around it, identifying objects of interest, and gradually adding information. You would experience the photograph somewhat differently from the actual scene because you would know that everything was fixed and your body could not move into the space.
A representation of this scene using perspective’s “laws” would make the image useful for certain purposes–for instance, for estimating the size of the table. Michael Baxandall (1978) argued that Renaissance perspective originated in a commercial culture in which patrons enjoyed estimating the size, weight, and value of objects represented in paintings.
But other systems have different benefits. Here is a print in which Toyoharu Kunichika (1835-1900) uses European perspective for the upper floor and a traditional Chinese system (with lines that remain parallel and objects placed higher if they are further away) for the lower floor. As Toshidama writes, this combination is useful for allowing us to see as many people and events as possible.
Perspective does not tell us how the world is–not in any simple way. The moon is not actually the size of a window, although it is represented as such in a perspectival picture (East Asian or European). Perspective is a way of representing how we experience the world. And in that respect, it is partial and sometimes even misleading. It overlooks that for us, important things seem bolder; objects can look soft, cold or painful as well as large or small; and some things appear in motion or likely to move, while others seem fixed. We can see a whole subject (such as a French intellectual in his study) and parts of it (his beard), at once and as connected to each other.
Merleau-Ponty writes:
Gustave Geoffrey’s [sic] table stretches into the bottom of the picture, and indeed, when our eye runs over a large surface, the images it successively receives are taken from different points of view, and the whole surface is warped. It is true that I freeze these distortions in repainting them on the canvas; I stop the spontaneous movement in which they pile up in perception and in which they tend toward the geometric perspective. This is also what happens with colors. Pink upon gray paper colors the background green. Academic painting shows the background as gray, assuming that the picture will produce the same effect of contrast as the real object. Impressionist painting uses green in the background in order to achieve a contrast as brilliant as that of objects in nature. Doesn’t this falsify the color relationship? It would if it stopped there, but the painter’s task is to modify all the other colors in the picture so that they take away from the green background its characteristics of a real color. Similarly, it is Cézanne’s genius that when the over-all composition of the picture is seen globally, perspectival distortions are no longer visible in their own right but rather contribute, as they do in natural vision, to the impression of an emerging order, of an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes.
The deeper point is that a science of nature is not a science of human experience. Third-person descriptions or models of physical reality are not accounts of how we experience things. And even when we are presented with a scientific description, it is something that we experience. For instance, we actively interpret a photograph or a diagram; we do not automatically imprint all of its pixels. And we listen to a person lecture about science; we do not simply absorb the content.
There are truths that can be expressed in third-person form–for example, that human eyes and brains work in certain ways. But there are also truths about how we experience everything, including scientific claims.
And Cézanne is a scientist of experience.
Quotations from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1946), in Sense and Non-sense, translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Northwestern University Press 1964); image by Paul Cézanne, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The image on the Mus?e d’Orsay’s website suggests a warmer palette, but I don’t know whether it’s open-source. I also refer to Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy : A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford, 1978).
See also: Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing; trying to look at Las Meninas; Wallace Stevens’ idea of order; an accelerating cascade of pearls (on Galileo and Tintoretto); and Rilke, “The Grownup.” My interactive novel, The Anachronist, is about perspective.
The post Cezanne’s portait of Gustave Geffroy appeared first on Peter Levine.