Questioning Cézanne across Sightlines: Balzac, Zola, and Merleau-Ponty

Although Merleau-Ponty’s privileging of Cézanne in the context of his philosophy of painting does not explicitly address the painter’s relation to literature, this relation is important and somewhat problematic. Cézanne was an avid reader of both classical Latin and contemporary French literature, but he sought, in his maturity, to dissociate painting from the inspiration of literature. The danger of a mode of figurative painting informed by literature is explored in Balzac’s novella The Unknown Masterpiece, of which there are echoes in Merleau-Ponty’s discussions of painting, and which is alluded to in Emile Zola’s novel The Masterpiece, which led Cézanne to break off his lifelong friendship with the author. Zola’s novel contradicts Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the artist’s creative freedom by portraying his protagonist, modeled on Cézanne, as destroyed by a fatality of destiny. Cézanne, in his maturity, sought to conjoin in painting a “logic of the eyes” with a “logic of the brain” resulting in an art genuinely “parallel with nature”, which it sought to express rather than to represent. The article explores this dissociation of painting from literature and autonomy with respect to what Merleau-Ponty calls “the dimension of color” and to Cézanne’s lifelong theme of bathers in a landscape