Cezanne’s way of seeing: artistic construction and neuroscience. From the article:

A new exhibition about Paul Cézanne at London’s Tate Modern presents an artist who unveiled strange truths about human perception. Cézanne’s paintings astounded his contemporaries….

The exact nature of Cézanne’s achievement has obsessed many art historians and philosophers over the years. But a critical insight could be found in the field of science. As discoveries by neuroscientists, philosophers, and psychologists have proved, Cézanne’s methods have a curious similarity with the visual processing of the human mind. 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….

Cézanne is showing us that he doesn’t want to see the scene from one consistent angle, but has embraced a roving gaze, fixating on each element at a time, so that when pieced together we can see the inconsistencies.

This is one of the ways that Cézanne’s approach chimes with what we now know about human visual processing. Although we are scarcely aware of it, our eyes are not static when we look, but are making minuscule darting movements (known as “saccades”) between areas of visual interest….

The fact that he intentionally retained mistakes in his final paintings does not mean that Cézanne was careless. On the contrary, according to Natalia Sidlina, a curator of the Tate Modern exhibition, Cézanne was thoughtful and well-read. “Cézanne translated Latin manuscripts for fun,” she told BBC Culture, “and was friends with some of the leading scientists in fields like natural science, geology and optics”….

A conventional still life like Steenwyck’s painting (and Daguerre’s photograph) give us a frozen moment in time. But that view of reality doesn’t tally with embodied experience. Looking is always durational. There’s no such thing as a present, Cézanne tells us – only a continuous flow between past and future.

For other posts on art and neuroscience, see here.