ABSTRACT

In 1945, Maurice Merleau-Ponry published an article entitled "Le Doute de Cezanne."! Cezanne's experience of his world, his reservations about his work, and his views concerning the epistemology of painting are explored in detail. The sources for this information include documented conversations with and letters to Emile Bernard during the last years of Cezanne's life (1904-1906). Merleau-Ponry returns again to the postimpressionist painter's projects and perspectives in Eye and Mind (1961).2 There, as in the posthumous The Visible and the Invisible, he develops the philosophical practice which he calls "interroga-. "non,

Seventeen years later, Jacques Derrida publishes a piece in the art journal Macula, nos. 3/4, entitled "Restitutions de la verite en peinture."! The essay is then expanded and collected as the fourth of four forays "aroundpainting" and published under the title La Verite en peinture (1978).4 Although the essay is concerned with Martin Heidegger and Van Gogh's shoes as developed in the 1965 correspondence between Heidegger and the art critic Meyer Schapiro,' Derrida quotes (in epi-gramrne) Cezanne's eighth of nine letters addressed to the painter Emile Bernard: "Je vous dois la verite enpeinture etje vous la dirai."6 From this statement, cited by the philosopher and art critic Hubert Damisch, Derrida derives his title La Verite en peinture. In that text, as in previous writings, Derrida puts into practice the critical strategies of "deconstruction."