Painting as the voice of silence: Merleau-Ponty, critic of Malraux

Abstract

The article explores the Merleau-Ponty's critique of André Malraux's conception of art history, with a special focus about painting. The core of this analysis lies in Merleau-Ponty's opposition to Malraux's notion of an “spirit” in art, responsible for its unity. For Merleau-Ponty, in his text on Indirect language and the voices of silence, the unity of painting seems to emerge from the expressive intentionality springing from the artist's intricate relationship with the world and with the pictorial tradition in its open possibilities. If in Malraux the voice of silence echoing in the painting is that of a spirit guiding the artist's creation on a path beyond contingency and with its own historicity, in Merleau-Ponty this voice is that of the tacit and entangled relationships that exist between the artist and the world, of which artistic creation is a possibility and an unveiling.