 Expression, particularly in language and the arts, plays an increasingly central role in Merleau-Ponty’s thought in the years following Phenomenology, when he aimed to formulate a general theory of expression as the grounding for a philosophy of history and  culture.[5]  This interest is first reflected in a series of essays addressing painting, literature, and film published in the years immediately following Phenomenology (in Merleau-Ponty 1996b/1964). These include Merleau-Ponty’s first essay on painting, “Cézanne’s Doubt”, which finds in Cézanne a proto-phenomenological effort to capture the birth of perception through painting. Cézanne epitomizes the paradoxical struggle of creative expression, which necessarily relies on the idiosyncracies of the artist’s individual history and psychology, as well as the resources of the tradition of painting, but can succeed only by risking a creative appropriation of these acquisitions in the service of teaching its audience to see the world anew. Similarly, Leonardo da Vinci’s artistic productivity is explicable neither in terms of his intellectual freedom (Valéry) nor his childhood (Freud) but as the dialectic of spontaneity and sedimentation by which Merleau-Ponty had formerly defined history.