by Jon Lackman | 18 October 2006 | Modern
Paul Cézanne, whom Picasso called “the father of us all,” died one hundred years ago next week. Deutschland radio interviews two art historians, Robert Kudielka and Gottfried Boehm, on his significance for modern painting. Boehm discusses Cézanne’s investigations into the logic of visual perception itself (as opposed to that of the objects we perceive), and the fact that a philosopher of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s caliber would turn to Cézanne as a point of departure for his phenomenology. Kudielka says the mystery is still with us today: if Cézanne painted how we see rather than what we see — if his paintings weren’t actually paintings “of” stone heaps or fruit bowls, what were they paintings of?
