Merleau Ponty: We are fascinated by the classical idea of intellectual, adequation that partly mute “thought” sometimes leaves us with the impression of a significant swirl of significations, a paralyzed, miscarried utterance….What, then, is the secret science which he has or
which he seeks? That dimension which lets Van Gogh say he must go “still further”? What is this fundamental of painting, perhaps of all culture? Indeed we cannot imagine how a mind could paint. It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into
paintings.

---Shall we say, then, that there is an inner gaze, that there is a third eye which sees the paintings and even the mental images, as we used to speak of a third ear which grasps messages from the outside through the noises they caused inside us?--- Read More:http://www.biolinguagem.com/biolinguagem_antropologia/merleauponty_1964_eyeandmind.pdf
But this disappointment issues from that spurious fantasy which claims for itself a positivity capable of making up for its own emptiness. It is the regret of not being everything, and a rather groundless regret at that. For if we cannot establish a hierarchy of civilizations or speak of progress—neither in painting nor even elsewhere—it is not because some fate impedes us; it is, rather, because the very first painting in some sense went to the farthest reach of the future. If no painting completes painting, if no work is itself ever absolutely completed, still, each creation changes, alters, clarifies, deepens, confirms, exalts, re-creates, or creates by anticipation all the others. If creations are not permanent acquisitions, it is not just that, like all things, they pass away: it is also that they have almost their entire lives before them. Read More:http://www.biolinguagem.com/biolinguagem_antropologia/merleauponty_1964_eyeandmind.pdf

---Panofsky shows that the "problems" of painting that structure its history are often solved obliquely, not in the course of inquiries instigated to solve them but, on the contrary, at some point when painters, having reached an impasse, apparently forget those problems and allow themselves to be attracted by other things. Then suddenly, their attention elsewhere, they happen upon the old problems and surmount the obstacle. read more:http://www.biolinguagem.com/biolinguagem_antropologia/merleauponty_1964_eyeandmind.pdf
For the same reason nothing is ever finally acquired and possessed for good. In “working over” a favorite problem, even if it is just the problem of velvet or wool, the true painter unknowingly upsets the givens of all the other problems. His quest is total even where it looks partial. Just when he has reached proficiency in some area, he finds that he has reopened another one where everything he said before must be said again in a different way. Thus what he has found he does not yet have. It remains to be sought out; the discovery itself calls forth still further quests. The idea of universal painting, of a totalization of painting, of painting’s being fully and definitively accomplished is an idea bereft of sense. For painters, if any remain, the world will always be yet to be painted; even if it lasts millions of years…it will all end without having been completed.Read More:http://www.biolinguagem.com/biolinguagem_antropologia/merleauponty_1964_eyeandmind.pdf

Merleau Ponty:Political regimes which denounce "degenerate" painting rarely destroy paintings. They hide them, and one senses here an element of "one never knows" amounting almost to an acknowledgment. The reproach of escapism is seldom aimed at the painter; we do not hold it against Cézanne that he lived hidden away at L'Estaque during the Franco-Prussian War. Read More:http://www.biolinguagem.com/biolinguagem_antropologia/merleauponty_1964_eyeandmind.pdf