This response to the recent Cezanne exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago and Tate Modern ex... more This response to the recent Cezanne exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago and Tate Modern examines Cezanne’s unusually prolonged way of looking at objects, landscapes, and faces. It asks whether this ‘personal way of seeing’ can account for some of the so-called distortions in his treatment of these motifs, and how it relates to autism. The article also address the issue of ‘realisation’, or what Cezanne considered a satisfactory expression of his ‘sensation’ in paint.
Word & Image A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry, 2020
This article argues that, in the early 1870s, Paul Cézanne began to make colours (including vermi... more This article argues that, in the early 1870s, Paul Cézanne began to make colours (including vermilion) his medium, whereas previously he had tended to treat them as inert materials, which he needed to force for effect. One factor in Cézanne’s change of heart was his receptiveness to the theme developed in the novels Manette Salomon (1867), by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, and La Proie et l’ombre (1876), by Marius Roux, that failing to relate responsively to his medium can have catastrophic consequences for the painter. Another was Cézanne’s espousal of Camille Pissarro’s practice in the early 1870s of using ton to create ‘harmony’ for the express purpose of ‘modelling’. The relationship between Cézanne’s ideas about ton and three theoretical sources are then examined. Two are much earlier: Roger de Piles’s writings about colour harmony and its spatial effects; and the treatise Michel-François Dandré-Bardon wrote in the eighteenth century that applied de Piles’s ideas to ton. The other is the series of manuals the animal painter, Julien de la Rochenoire, published in the 1850s, which maintain that ‘relations’ between tons were crucial to ‘modelling’. How Cézanne used tons is then analysed in the painting Madame Cézanne in a Red Armchair (1877) (now in Boston). It is shown that colour relationships are more numerous and more finely integrated in this work than in its sister painting (in Stockholm), with the result that its harmony is especially tightly knit. This, it is maintained, allows it to model-shape at the same time as bestowing cohesion to the depicted scene. The article ends by considering how, unlike the de Goncourts’ Naz Coriolis or Claude Monet, who pushed painting to its limits in an attempt to capture the effects of shine and sparkle, Cézanne opted to play them down in order to give solidity to the world depicted in his paintings.
The perspectival “distortions” commonly observed in Cézanne's paintings can be seen as the expres... more The perspectival “distortions” commonly observed in Cézanne's paintings can be seen as the expression of “blind” visuomotor experiences as well as conscious visual perceptions. They thus correspond not to actual movements but to “virtual” movements internal to acts of perception of a kind described by Merleau-Ponty, which allow the perceiving subject a fuller sense of the physicality of things. Cézanne conveyed this form of engagement with things, alongside the appearances they present, by using varieties of parallel projection, often in disguise. His repudiation of perspective implies a repudiation of spectacle as the normative form of visual experience in modern life.
One aspect of natural colour which fascinated artists and scientists was the appearance of blue a... more One aspect of natural colour which fascinated artists and scientists was the appearance of blue and green coloured shadows for a few minutes around dawn and dusk, and (more rarely) of blue shadows in broad daylight. The question of how artists saw and depicted such shadows is inseparable from the theories they held of their causes, which do not correspond with how we understand them today. How painters perceived these effects is also bound up with the viewing strategies they employed to render them more apparent. In addition, the belief that coloured shadows were 'beautiful' is central to the fascination they held for artists and physicists alike.
This response to the recent Cezanne exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago and Tate Modern ex... more This response to the recent Cezanne exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago and Tate Modern examines Cezanne’s unusually prolonged way of looking at objects, landscapes, and faces. It asks whether this ‘personal way of seeing’ can account for some of the so-called distortions in his treatment of these motifs, and how it relates to autism. The article also address the issue of ‘realisation’, or what Cezanne considered a satisfactory expression of his ‘sensation’ in paint.
Word & Image A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry, 2020
This article argues that, in the early 1870s, Paul Cézanne began to make colours (including vermi... more This article argues that, in the early 1870s, Paul Cézanne began to make colours (including vermilion) his medium, whereas previously he had tended to treat them as inert materials, which he needed to force for effect. One factor in Cézanne’s change of heart was his receptiveness to the theme developed in the novels Manette Salomon (1867), by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, and La Proie et l’ombre (1876), by Marius Roux, that failing to relate responsively to his medium can have catastrophic consequences for the painter. Another was Cézanne’s espousal of Camille Pissarro’s practice in the early 1870s of using ton to create ‘harmony’ for the express purpose of ‘modelling’. The relationship between Cézanne’s ideas about ton and three theoretical sources are then examined. Two are much earlier: Roger de Piles’s writings about colour harmony and its spatial effects; and the treatise Michel-François Dandré-Bardon wrote in the eighteenth century that applied de Piles’s ideas to ton. The other is the series of manuals the animal painter, Julien de la Rochenoire, published in the 1850s, which maintain that ‘relations’ between tons were crucial to ‘modelling’. How Cézanne used tons is then analysed in the painting Madame Cézanne in a Red Armchair (1877) (now in Boston). It is shown that colour relationships are more numerous and more finely integrated in this work than in its sister painting (in Stockholm), with the result that its harmony is especially tightly knit. This, it is maintained, allows it to model-shape at the same time as bestowing cohesion to the depicted scene. The article ends by considering how, unlike the de Goncourts’ Naz Coriolis or Claude Monet, who pushed painting to its limits in an attempt to capture the effects of shine and sparkle, Cézanne opted to play them down in order to give solidity to the world depicted in his paintings.
The perspectival “distortions” commonly observed in Cézanne's paintings can be seen as the expres... more The perspectival “distortions” commonly observed in Cézanne's paintings can be seen as the expression of “blind” visuomotor experiences as well as conscious visual perceptions. They thus correspond not to actual movements but to “virtual” movements internal to acts of perception of a kind described by Merleau-Ponty, which allow the perceiving subject a fuller sense of the physicality of things. Cézanne conveyed this form of engagement with things, alongside the appearances they present, by using varieties of parallel projection, often in disguise. His repudiation of perspective implies a repudiation of spectacle as the normative form of visual experience in modern life.
One aspect of natural colour which fascinated artists and scientists was the appearance of blue a... more One aspect of natural colour which fascinated artists and scientists was the appearance of blue and green coloured shadows for a few minutes around dawn and dusk, and (more rarely) of blue shadows in broad daylight. The question of how artists saw and depicted such shadows is inseparable from the theories they held of their causes, which do not correspond with how we understand them today. How painters perceived these effects is also bound up with the viewing strategies they employed to render them more apparent. In addition, the belief that coloured shadows were 'beautiful' is central to the fascination they held for artists and physicists alike.
Many artists and scientists – including Buffon, Goethe, and Philipp Otto Runge – who observed the... more Many artists and scientists – including Buffon, Goethe, and Philipp Otto Runge – who observed the vivid coloured shadows that appear outdoors around dawn and dusk, or indoors when a candle burns under waning daylight, chose to describe their colours as ‘beautiful’.
Paul Smith explains what makes these ephemeral effects worthy of such appreciation – or how depictions of coloured shadows have genuine aesthetic and epistemological significance. This multi-disciplinary book synthesises methodologies drawn from art history (close pictorial analysis), psychology and neuroscience (theories of colour constancy), history of science (the changing paradigms used to explain coloured shadows), and philosophy (theories of perception and aesthetic value drawn from Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty).
This article examines first of all how painters' ability to perceive transient coloured shadows w... more This article examines first of all how painters' ability to perceive transient coloured shadows was both facilitated, and impoverished, by scientific theories of their causes. It then investigates how developing techniques of viewing the scene through a frame or half-closed eyes allowed artists to apprehend these elusive phenomena in something approaching their full richness.
Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry, 2013
This article offers an alternative to Richard Wollheim’s argument that our perceptual experience ... more This article offers an alternative to Richard Wollheim’s argument that our perceptual experience of a picture is ‘twofold’ because we see what it represents ‘in’ its ‘marked surface’. It is argued instead that we only see a picture’s immaterial ‘image’ in wholly virtual syntactic structures which we must extract from this surface. What syntactic structure is, and how it can be disaggregated from the marks that carry it, is examined. So too is how marks resolve into syntax, and how, when they do not, they contribute to pictorial meaning. A case is made that a picture’s marked surface, syntax, and meaning each has its own particular structure, but that we can use any one of these to grasp either of the others. The article ends with a consideration of how the emerging meaning of a picture can inform our sense of its syntax. Throughout it refers to works by the ‘Ancients’, Samuel Palmer and Edward Calvert, because these demonstrate a clear practical concern with the potential of separate marks to generate complex syntactic structures. The title is taken from a remark of Palmer’s.
This article argues that there is such a thing as pictorial grammar, despite objections to the ve... more This article argues that there is such a thing as pictorial grammar, despite objections to the very idea by philosophers. It proposes that John Willats developed a theory of this grammar on the basis of Chomsky’s early work, which demonstrates that pictures are segmentable into semantic units, and that these are organized by syntax into larger, grammatically coherent structures. It also argues that pictorial grammar, thus conceived, is innately grounded and that it operates to transform an underlying perceptual content into a surface form. The advantages of this theory are that it allows us to specify how pictures produce meanings both by obeying and by transgressing grammaticality, and to reconfigure our present understanding of what is conventional or arbitrary, and what is natural and iconic, about depiction. It concludes with a consideration of the further possibilities of a theory of pictorial grammar.
French Studies: Special Issue: The Nineteenth-Century Art Novel, 2007
This special issue of French Studies examines a body of narratives featuring French art and artis... more This special issue of French Studies examines a body of narratives featuring French art and artists published at representative periods during the nineteenth century (in both French and English). There are strong thematic continuities between many of the examples discussed, particularly as regards their concern over the social and economic position of the artist, and the nature and gendering of creativity. The topoi of the genius and the raté also recur throughout. Several texts are vehicles for voicing aesthetic and political positions. And many draw closely on contemporary figures, events, and debates for their content. Yet this special issue does not aim to identify a discursive unity so much as to exhibit the variety and richness of the art novel's evolution. It is also concerned to address some of the methodological issues involved in reading this kind of text, including the selectivity of the canon, intertextual connections, and the relationship between fiction and fact. It is hoped it will not only plot some new and unfamiliar material in an area still represented for most by a mere handful of 'major' texts, but also bring some of the questions involved by this expanded configuration of the field into sharper focus.
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Cezanne by Paul Smith
Seurat by Paul Smith
Colour by Paul Smith
Paul Smith explains what makes these ephemeral effects worthy of such appreciation – or how depictions of coloured shadows have genuine aesthetic and epistemological significance. This multi-disciplinary book synthesises methodologies drawn from art history (close pictorial analysis), psychology and neuroscience (theories of colour constancy), history of science (the changing paradigms used to explain coloured shadows), and philosophy (theories of perception and aesthetic value drawn from Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty).