"Art is a simile of the Creation..."
                                                    -Paul Klee

The natural landscape has always been a canvas for man to implement his creation upon. Artists for centuries have drawn inspiration from the bucolic panoramas of their native lands. Architects in a similar fashion have marked sites with their buildings. In the quote above, the artist Paul Klee speaks of man's artistic endeavors being influenced by the natural- dictating his designs.



However, the reverse interplay of artist with landscape is illustrated in the landscape paintings of Paul Cézanne. In his interaction with the landscape of Aix-en-Provence, Cézanne states, “The landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness.”ˡ  In this statement, Cézanne is declaring that he is in control of his perception of the landscape, giving and taking details which he feels is relevant to his recognition of the world.



The Lived Perspective

Cézanne's landscape paintings display a blending of consciousness, the world, and the body engaging one another. In doing so, the painting departs from the traditional one-point perspective of the romantic images of the past and embodies qualities of time and space. This view of the landscape is defined as the lived perspective. It can be exemplified in the painting Road Before the Mountains, Sainte-Victoire. In the painting, Mount Saint-Victoire is depicted in a field of short quick brush strokes- sometimes varying in color. This inattention to blend the colors becomes telling of an awareness of time and space. Cézanne wanted to capture every moment in painting as he was viewing it. Merleau-Ponty translates this task as the Primacy of Perception, that is, “the experience of perception is our presence at the moment when things, truths, values, are constituted for us, that perception is a nascent logos.”²



The road leading to the mountain does not seem to follow a single perspective and twists and turns in a warped fashion. This could be due to  Cézanne's placement of himself as he painted en plein air over several days. The road could be viewed from multiple vantage points and thus different views are depicted from multiple angles. In this way, the idea of intersubjectivity is introduced and we are reacquainted with the presence of the speaking subject. The lived perspective as illustrated in Cézanne's painting combines a dogged, wandering gaze with an intense attention in framing moments in time and space.



Monster (n.)- an animal, plant, or thing of abnormal form or structure



Cézanne's exclusion from the major art world of his time and his withdrawal from Parisian society to Aix-en-Provence made him a monster in one respect. In another more fascinating respect, I place  Cézanne within the category of "monster" for his uniqueness in his approach to perceiving the world. If you were to personify a creature that embodies qualities of intersubjectivity and the lived perspective it would be one that we could really call a monster. Cézanne employed a binocular vision³  when painting in the intersubjective manner. This refers to being conscious of what your right and lefts eyes perceived individually, rather than painting the culmination of what both saw(single point perspective). The common man only perceives with two eyes but Cézanne's paintings imagine a creature with several ocular organs around its body.



And so the architecturalization of  the perceptional ideas of Cézanne coincides with the idea of a monster in its departure from a normal reference. An artist's hut within that embodies these ideas becomes a single volume with protruding apertures, all different sizes that give attention to various framed views of the landscape. The hut can be placed in various locations to aide in the production of landscape paintings of the lived perspective. Within the space, artists surround themselves with random views of the prairies- sky, ground, earth, vegetation. However random these views are, they refer to the lived perspective viewing of the landscape. At the same time, they offer a concentrated examination of the view that is framed.



ˡ Michael B. Smith, Ed., The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetic Reader (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 68.

² Samuel B. Malin, Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 31.

³ Eric Matthews, The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002), 147.