The Blue of the Sea: Merleau-Ponty, Malraux, and Modern Painting

Toute l'histoire moderne de la peinture, son effort pour se dégager de l'illusionnisme et pour acquérir ses propres dimensions ont une signification métaphysique.

Merleau-Ponty, L'Œil et l'esprit, 1961, 61

Renoir used to work facing the sea. We know the story of the garagiste from Cassis who once surprised him there: "C'étaient des femmes nues qui se baignaient dans un autre endroit. Il regardait je ne sais quoi, et il changeait un petit coin." ¹ The paradox of this story is that it pits the mechanic in flagrant disregard of the enigma constitutive of modern painting. Incapable of understanding the scene, and still less capable of identifying the model, the mechanic held the painter responsible for not painting what he saw, or for not seeing what he was looking at. Renoir was elusive, and Malraux drew his own conclusion. If the blue of the sea became the stream in the Lavandières, the painter's vision was then "moins une façon de regarder la mer que la secrète élaboration d'un monde auquel appartenait cette profondeur de bleu qu'il reprenait à l'immensité" (VS, 278). Merleau-Ponty takes Malraux at his word: what matters is that Renoir was, in fact, looking at the sea. Challenging Malraux on the hidden variables of his reasoning--metamorphosis, style or vision--Merleau-Ponty remains focused on the process of painting. Renoir, like Cézanne, painting "sur le motif" reiterated with a professional's confidence a teratological gaze, without immediate reference, deprived of any intentional object or expected context; a gaze which eluded the canon of perception but had already been the painter's practice for nearly a century. Leaving aside perception as a threshold to the realm of the sensible, the painter also threw the whole gamut of its philosophical claims into question. What did this "modern" painting that Merleau-Ponty would detach piece by piece from the exemplary Cézanne, show and prove? This question occupied Merleau-Ponty for more than fifteen years. And he was still trying to formulate it in the fifties, when Malraux assigned the place of honor in the Imaginary Museum to the paintings that came after Goya. Merleau-Ponty intervened precisely there, where the whole argument was at play.

Let us leave aside the anecdote whose role was just to identify the aesthetic question, which still had to be decided after the official museum opened its doors to the artists who had once been compelled to open their own Salon des Refusés. The point of departure is precisely where Malraux placed it, leaving the viewer the responsibility of declining the painting in the free and indirect style of a Flaubertian character. "Des femmes se baignaient": some women were swimming . . . They looked like confused masses whose imperfect movements (the "incoherent tense" as Valéry called it) suspended the vehemence of the action and the precision of the gesture. Or rather, they were like dashes of color, inducing an itinerary of reminiscence, set loose on their own trajectory, leading from some Homeric Nausicaa to the anticipated Grandes Baigneuses, crossing into Renoir's Lavandières as if by accident, and alluding to the forthcoming ochre-pink monochromes of the Demoiselles d'Avignon. The unassignable "somewhere else" and the "I don't know what," which diluted that imperceptible theme in the mouth of the mechanic, threw an equal uncertainty on the "here" of the painter and the "there" of the canvas. A tacit transitivity leading from the one to the other was broken--not the purely material transitivity founded on a process of imitation supposed to connect the painting to the model, but an ideal and wholly subjective transitivity, founded on implicit unchanging determinations passed from the cognition of the world to the recognition of the painting through the hypothesis of a common description. The categories of place, time, or...