Cézanne paints: ‘whole body’ practices and the genre of self‐portrayal

This paper restores bodily practice in the perception and construction of a painted artwork that engages the visible world. My choice of Cézanne in the light of this concern is three‐fold. Firstly, to counter his role as a painter on the road to abstraction in the story of Modern art, in order to reintroduce his continuities with traditional western genres. Secondly, through reading Maurice Merleau‐Ponty to further explore Cézanne's self‐portraits as acts of embodied engagement through the primacy of perception. This activity is mirrored in his self‐portraits as the ambiguity of the self as subject, engaged in a confrontation with the reflection of the self as the observed other. Finally, I critique contemporary theories that read paintings, and by extension many kinds of artworks, as only images in a linguistic sign system bypassing the performance practices that they embody.