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[He] asked which was the lying sense, feeling or seeing?
Art historians usually distinguish between two divergent trends in modern painting: an expressionist one, which found favor above all in Germanic, Protestant countries, and another which I would call “thing-ist,” whose adherents mostly came from the Latin, Catholic world (from Cézanne to the cubism of Picasso and Braque, from Léger up to Italian arte povera). But this distinction should be closely examined. While Van Gogh and Munch on the one hand and Cézanne on the other appear to open what is perceived as two alternative approaches in modern art, one may ask whether this distinction is necessary. Is it, in short, something etched deeply into the project of modern art?
There are two ways of perceiving the relation between the subject and the real: while what I would call the Van Gogh lineage aims at representing above all the painter's gaze on what he sees, the Cézanne lineage is dominated by a vision or view that aims at eliminating the gaze. We can glean this distinction from various psychoanalytic, especially Jacques Lacan's, reflections on the dynamics of the gaze; it is a way of putting new wine in old casks, the casks being the commonplace view of Cezanne's painting in particular as aiming at pure visibility. That distinction—which to many can appear too drastic and vague—finds its factual confirmation, however, in neurology. But first, the distinction between “painting the gaze” and “painting the vision” needs to be explained.