" The unity of painting does not exist in the Museum alone; it exists in that single task which all painters are confronted with and which makes the situation such that one day they will be comparable in the Museum, and such that these fires answer one another in the night. The first sketches on the walls of caves set forth the world as "to be painted"
or "to be sketched" and called for an indefinite future of painting, so that they speak to us and we answer them by metamorphoses in which they collaborate with us. There are thus two historicities. One is ironic
or even derisory, and made of misinterpretations, for each age struggles against the others as against aliens by imposing its concerns and perspectives upon them. This history is forgetfulness rather than
memory; it is dismemberment, ignorance, externality. But the other history, without which the first would be impossible, is constituted and reconstituted step by step by the interest which bears us toward that
which is not us and by that life which the past, in a continuous exchange, brings to us and finds in us, and which it continues to lead in each painter who revives, recaptures, and renews the entire undertak-
ing of painting in each new work. "

― Maurice Merleau-Ponty , Signs