See What You're Missing: New Ways of Looking at the World Through Art by Will Gompertz

Author:Will Gompertz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2023-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

Paul Cézanne: Seeing with Both Eyes

Within the painter, there are two things: the eye and the mind; they must serve each other. The artist must work at developing them mutually: the eye for the vision of nature and the mind for the logic of organized sensations, which provide the means of expression.

– Paul Cézanne

Game-changing moments are rare in art. There was the invention of woodblock printing in China, but that was over 1,000 years ago. More recently came the development of geometric linear perspective, only around 700 years ago in Renaissance Italy. After that nothing much happened for hundreds of years beyond the introduction of canvas as an alternative to wood panel as a medium for painters. Tradition was respected, rules were applied. Until, that is, the middle of the nineteenth century when not one, but two game-changing events occurred at roughly the same time. The first was the invention of small tubes with airtight lids which could be filled with oil paint. At once, artists were liberated from the confines of their studios to go outside and paint en plein air in front of their chosen subject (a mountain, a lake, etc.). Now, at last, they could finish their picture in situ wherever they happened to be rather than go through the laborious process of sketching outdoors in pencil, ink or watercolour, before returning to their studio to make the final oil painting. It also meant their pictures, created in real time, could accurately reflect the atmospheric changes occurring before the artist’s eyes. The manner in which artists looked at, and recorded, the world fundamentally changed, with the likes of Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt and Camille Pissarro leading the way under the collective banner of the Impressionists. There was another among their number, a rather grouchy individual called Paul Cézanne (1839–1906). It was he who transformed how we would all experience the world. His unfussy pictures stripped out the tiny pictorial details in favour of a pleasing overall design, an approach which directly led to twentieth-century Modernism. It was a radical new style brought about by the other game-changing event that occurred in the mid-1800s: the invention of the camera.

Photography revolutionized art like the aeroplane revolutionized travel. Artists were no longer compelled to act as visual documentarians, any more than holidaymakers were limited to a fortnight up the road at Granny’s. The camera set artists free; it let them loose to experiment with different ways of seeing.

All those thousands of paintings in museums around the world that were painted BC (Before Cézanne) are a little dishonest in both conception and realization. European academic painting was designed to deceive, to create the illusion of a three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional canvas. It was a visual trick made possible by composing an image from a fixed point of view with a single vanishing point (linear perspective), which had the effect of fooling the viewer into perceiving a depth of field when there was none. Their imaginary ‘box

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