Merleau-Ponty on Cézanne

...It is Cézanne's genius that when the overall composition of the picture is seen globally, perspectival distortions are no longer visible in their own right but rather contribute, as they do in natural vision, to impression of an emerging order, an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes. In the same way, the contour of an object conceived as a line encircling the object belongs not to the visible we but to geometry. If one outlines the shape of an apple with a continuous line, one makes an object of the shape, whereas the contour is rather ideal limit toward which the sides of the apple recede in depth. Not to indicate any shape would be to deprive the objects of their identity. To trace just a single outline sacrifices depth—that is, the dimension in which the thing is presented not as spread out before us but as an inexhaustible reality full of reserves. That is why Cézanne follows the swell of the object in modulated colors and indicates several outlines in blue. Rebounding among these, one's glance captures a shape that emerges from among them all, just as it does in perception.
-"Cézanne's Doubt," in Sense and Non-Sense

This is just a spot-on description of what it is like to look at a Cézanne. The play going on in the painting is not some proto-Cubist mind game: what Cézanne's getting at is always more basic. Thus to say he is bringing the medium to the fore, or bringing the spatiality of the objects to the fore--I've heard both explanations--by producing, especially in his late paintings, the various planes of color that makes up a landscape--all this misses the point. Finality of form, and its multiple possibilities based on the odd reciprocity between the embodied gaze or intention and the landscape: this is closer, I think, to what the experience of a Cézanne is getting at. On this note, one might take a little issue with how Merleau-Ponty says that Cézanne "indicates several outlines." Cézanne surely does not give us many lines instead of one. But what is being described is not a line itself but an "outline:" that is, Cézanne gives us several ways in which an object can finalize its form, stand out of itself and before us, and yet also reset itself back into the whole of which it is a part. Merleau-Ponty could be clearer about this: the phrase is not well-crafted. But it helps if you know that for Merleau-Ponty, the line itself is always the least important part of the thing, a mere beginning point beyond which and through which one moves. A solid black line, for Merleau-Ponty, isn't significant in how it constructs a boundary, but rather how it itself has depth within it, how it indicates a plane stretching into itself and beyond it. Cross-hatching, for him, completely misses the point, though it is precisely trying to effect depth through the mere use of lines. Merleau-Ponty would counter that it is doing it already: the line is a virtuality, indicating a presence of which it is the mere extension or outer shell. Obviously there is a lot that is questionable about this. But in his descriptions of some of the more complicated and yet more fundamental aspects of Cézanne, Merleau-Ponty's viewpoint is an invaluable resource.