Depth and Space

The Cartesian conception of space as an empty grid is unable to account for embodied perspective from which all space is experienced. Merleau-Ponty turns to painting in order to learn something of a different conception of space and depth. The understanding of space Merleau-Ponty seeks to articulate is that of lived space (309): "I live in it from the inside; I am immersed in it. After all, the world is all around me, not in front of me."

Painting gestures to such a thick conception of depth that shatters the abstract shell of space (see, 311). Cézanne uses color to convey this richer understanding of depth. This, Merleau-Ponty suggests is at work in Cézanne's Portrait of Vallier, which "sets between the colors white spaces which take on the function of giving shape to, and setting off, a being more general than the yellow-being of green-being or blue-being" (312).

Merleau-Ponty points also to Cézanne's watercolors in which space "radiates around planes that cannot be assigned to any place at all" (312).

Return, then, to Cézanne's work on Mont Saint-Victoire to witness the overlapping movement of planes of color (see, 312).

Movement and Line Merleau-Ponty also points to the painting of Paul Klee (1879-1940) who used line and color to convey this thick sense of depth and movement endemic to living space. He sites Klee as saying that the "line renders visible" rather than imitating the visible (314). This is evident in the following two paintings, Ad Parnassum (1932) and Highways and Byways (1929).