The camera obscura, a device that cast high-focus projections into a sealed box, which had been refined in the 16th and 17th Centuries, seemed to confirm that this was how perception worked.īy the late 1870s, however, Cézanne began questioning that presumption. It shows the eye receiving a snapshot image from the outside world, which is then understood unambiguously by the brain (represented by the old man at the bottom). This philosophical view is encapsulated in a diagram (made at about the same time as Steenwyck's painting) from Descartes's 1637 essay on vision La Dioptrique. Apart from the rougher handling of paint, it is a close relative of traditional scenes like Harmen Steenwyck's baroque-era Still Life: An Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life from 1640.Īt that point, Cézanne's belief, backed by centuries of scientific theory, was that the eye is exactly like a camera: a gateway for the flow of visual truth that constructs a detailed panorama of our visible environment. His early Sugar Bowl, Pears and Blue Cup (1865-70), for example, shows Cézanne seeing and painting in a relatively traditional way. He overturned centuries of theories about how the eye works by depicting a world constantly in motion, affected by the passing of time and infused with the artist's own memories and emotions.Ĭézanne's insights into human perception took a lifetime of slow experimentation. As discoveries by neuroscientists, philosophers, and psychologists have proved, Cézanne's methods have a curious similarity with the visual processing of the human mind.
But a critical insight could be found in the field of science. The exact nature of Cézanne's achievement has obsessed many art historians and philosophers over the years. The painter and critic Maurice Denis shared a sense of bewilderment about Cézanne's revolution in visual representation, writing in 1912 that he had "never heard an admirer… give me a clear and precise account of his admiration."
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In 1881, Paul Gauguin joked about how to extract Cézanne's mysterious methods, instructing Camille Pissarro to "ply him with one of those mysterious homeopathic drugs and come straight to Paris to share the information". Why 1960 was a turning point for Africa They seemed to offer a radical new way of seeing, even though no one could explain exactly how. Cézanne's paintings astounded his contemporaries. A new exhibition about Paul Cézanne at London's Tate Modern presents an artist who unveiled strange truths about human perception.
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