Phenomenology of Perception
by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Merleau-Ponty is a French philosopher and a contemporary of Sartre and De Beauvoir. Of great importance to him is that we are ‘embodied’ creatures, which is crucial to both the creation and experience of painting.
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“Merleau-Ponty was a French philosopher from the 40s and 50s, a contemporary of Sartre and De Beauvoir. I read him for the first time in my early 20s before his works were translated. He represents so-called ‘existential phenomenology’. Of fundamental importance to him was that we are ‘embodied’ creatures, not disembodied perceptual systems and free-floating intelligences. He understood painting to be involved in a network of relations in which embodiment is crucial to the creation and experience of the work…Merleau-Ponty has meant a great deal to me. My own feelings about art as a young man were intensely ‘bodily’. It was marvellous to discover that’s how he thought it should be.” Read more...
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Michael Fried, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
