Matthew Murphy’s Reviews > The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting > Status Update

“Matisse, set within a human’s time and vision, looked at the still open whole of his work ib progress and brought his brush toward the line which called for it in order that the painting might finall be that which it was in the process of becoming. By a simple gesture he resolved the problem which in retrospect seemed to imply an infinite number of data.”

“There is thus an opaqueness of language. Nowhere does it stop and leave a place for pure meaning; it is always limited only by more language, and meaning appears within it only set in a context of words. Like a charade, language is understood only through the interaction of signs, each of which, taken separately, is equivocal or banal, and makes sense only by being combined with others.”

“The untiring way in which the train of words crosses abd recrosses itself, and the emergence one unimpeachable day of a certain phonemic scale according to which discourse is visibly composed, finally seats the child over to the side of those who speak.”

“A painting is not substitutable for a thousand words, nor may a thousand words replace a painting. In the end what we must say is that language is neither primary nor secondary to painting, both are different modes of signification for the expression of meaning.”

“One day, once and for all, something was set in motion which, even during sleep, can no longer cease to see or not to see, to feel or not to feel, to suffer or be happy, to think or rest from thinking, in a word to ‘have it out with the world.’ My first perception... is an ever present event, an unforgettable tradition.”

“An artist’s style is as inaccessible to himself or herself as our own face and everyday gestures. Marleau-Pontt says that it ‘is just as recognizable for others and just as little visible to him as his silhouette.’”

“Deprived of any context other than official museum approval, presented not in progress but in retrospective, they vie with one another as hostile, rival abstractions in an unjustified, agressive modernity.”

“Museums have existed for barely two hundred years and only in cultures influenced by modern Europe, yet for most of us, our awareness of what painting is depends nearly exclusively upon this institution.”

“We shall see that the idea of complete expression is nonsensical, and that all language is indirect or allusive—that it is, if you wish, silence.”