Merleau-Ponty and the analysis of painting

By Asma Sabzkar
Hermes publisher, First publish, 2018

This is a book about philosophy of art and is written to find a new way for analyzing the work of art based on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, phenomenological and existential contemporary French philosopher, is one of the most important figures in the transition of philosophy from modern to postmodern. Using Husserl's phenomenology, Heidegger and Sartre's existential attitude, and Gestalt psychology, he opens up a new perspective to the philosophical world that can overcome many of the problems of Western philosophy.

It seems necessary to know that Merleau-Ponty’s most important ideas can be found in his three major terms which his philosophy is founded on it; the Perception, the Body and the Vison, and his books have the ability to extract a method for analyzing the work of art because of his particular interests in art, since art help him to extend his philosophical ideas in many cases. Therefore, this book tries to achieve such an analyzing way in addition to recognizing Merleau-Ponty’s ideas.

For this purpose, it is written in three chapters. The first chapter describes basic terms of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy as mentioned above. The second chapter, attempts to derive philosophical relations between art and philosophy based on his thought as well as dealing with artwork by him for describing his philosophy. The third chapter focuses on the practical use of these ratios in analyzing several paintings as examples, in order to provide a systematic way of analyzing the work of art.

If you are into philosophy of art, read and enjoy.