 In a long extract from the manuscript that was revised and published in 1952 as “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” (in Merleau-Ponty 1960/1964), Merleau-Ponty brings this understanding of language into conversation with Sartre’s What is Literature? and André Malraux’s The Voices of Silence. Sharing Malraux’s criticisms of the museum’s role in framing the reception of painting, but rejecting his interpretation of modern painting as subjectivist, Merleau-Ponty offers an alternative understanding of “institution” (from Husserl’s Stiftung) as the creative establishment of a new field of meaning that opens an historical development. The style of an artist is not merely subjective but lived as a historical trajectory of expression that begins with perception itself and effects a “coherent deformation” in inherited traditions. Rather than opposed as silent and speaking, painting and language are both continuations of the expressivity of a perceptual style into more malleable mediums. The unfinished character of modern painting is therefore not a turn from the objectivity of representation toward subjective creation but rather a more authentic testament to the paradoxical logic of all expression.