  In Sartre’s What is Literature? this apparent disdain for the materiality of painting seems at odds with another aesthetic principle of the existentialists, namely, the capacity of art to witness the obtrusiveness of the world, and, in exceptional moments of aesthetic communion, its inhuman beauty. Indeed, in a few, smaller texts of Sartre’s (for example, those he wrote for exhibition openings) he seems to return to this aspect of the artwork, which he himself had so powerfully demonstrated in his first novel. However, it is true that the existentialists are more interested in the ways in which human beings sort out the entanglements of their freedom in the absurd world, than in the depiction of the materiality of that world. Merleau-Ponty’s texts on the ontological grandeur of Cézanne’s painting are not representative of existential aesthetics generally, but reflect only that author’s unique perspective on art and ontology.