Previous - 138. Paul Cezanne
Paul Cézanne continued
There's a nice summary of impressionism on pages 100-101, but I'm not going to copy it.p103 ...Cézanne had stopped worshiping light. He found the impressionist project -- the description of light's dance upon the eye -- too insubstantial. ("Monet is only an eye," Cézanne once said, with more than a little condescension.)... He had stopped arguing with the camera. Instead, in his postimpressionist paintings he wanted to reveal how the moment is more than its light. If the impressionists reflected the eye, Cézanne's art was a mirror held up to the mind.
p104 ... Cézanne discovered that visual forms... are mental inventions that we unconsciously impose onto our sensations... No matter how hard he tried, Cézanne couldn't escape the sly interpretations of his brain. In his abstract paintings, Cézanne wanted to reveal this psychological process, to make us aware of the particular way the mind creates reality. His art shows us what we cannot see, which is how we see.
This is related to Annie Dillard's "tree with the lights in it" from Pilgrim At Tinker Creek.
The limits of Light
...Particles of light alter the delicate molecular structure of the receptors in the retina. This cellular shudder triggers a chain reaction that ends with a flash of voltage. The photon's energy has become information. [Footnote: "...the photons cause the sodium ion channels inside our photoreceptors to close, which causes the cell to become hyperpolarized..."]
...in our evolved system, the eyeball's map of light is transformed again and again until, milliseconds later, the canvas's description enters our consciousness. Amid the swirl of color we see the apple.
...
[I'm not going to copy the scientific quest for how we see.] p106 ...Hubel and Weisel became the first scientists to describe reality as it appears to the early layers of the visual cortex. This is what the world looks like before it has been seen, when the mind is still creating the sense of sight.
Not sure about the use of "mind" here. Maybe the under-mind -- that Operating System level I've talked about before.
It's as if [Cézanne] broke the brain apart and saw how seeing occurs... Cézanne's painting [above] is not about the sky or the rocks or the trees. He has broken each of these elements into their sensory parts, deconstructing the scene in order to show us how the mind reconstructs it.
...Cézanne... [creates] the entire picture out of patches and strokes... His impasto paint calls attention to itself, forcing us to see the canvas as a constructive process and not a fixed image... Instead of giving us a scene of fully realized forms, Cézanne supplies us with layers of suggestive edges, out of which forms slowly unfurl...
p107 This is the abstract reality represented by the neurons of the V1... The cells of the visual cortex, flooded by rumors of light, see lines extending in every possible direction. Angles intersect, brushstrokes disagree, and surfaces are hopelessly blurred together. The world is still formless, nothing but a collage of chromatic blocks... Before we can make sense of Cézanne's abstract landscape, the mind must intervene.
...From the earliest levels of visual processing in the brain up to the final polished image, coherence and contrast are stressed, often at the expense of accuracy.
...
[Here we get more about how the brain processes visual data into what we see, leading to a review of Oliver Sacks's Dr. P, the man who mistook his wife for a hat.]
p109 ...when Dr. P was given a rose, he described his conscious thought process to Sacks: "it looks about six inches in length. A convoluted red form with a linear green attachment." But these accurate details never triggered the idea of a rose. Dr. P had to smell the flower before he could identify its form. As Sacks put it, "Dr. P saw nothing as familiar. Visually, he was lost in a world of lifeless abstractions."
To look at a Cézanne painting is to become acutely aware of what Dr. P is missing. Staring at his postimpressionist art, we feel our top-down process at work. It is because Cézanne knew that the impression was not enough -- that the mind must complete the impression -- that he created a style both more abstract and more truthful than the impressionists...
In the section on impressionism, the author mentions the visual problems many of them had. I wonder if Cézanne had anything in common with Dr. P?
p110 ...While [Cézanne] deconstructed his paintings until they were on the verge of unraveling, his paintings don't unravel, and that is their secret. [Like Thelonious Monk?] Instead they tremble on the edge of existence... Until Cézanne sold a canvas -- and he rarely sold anything -- he continued to edit his brushstrokes, trying to edge closer to the delicate reality he wanted to describe. [A recurring theme, here.] His work would become thick with paint, with layer after layer of carefully applied color...
...he wanted to give the brain just enough to decipher, and not a brushstroke more. If his representations were too accurate or too abstract, everything fell apart. The mind would not be forced to enter the work of art. His lines would have no meaning.
[Cézanne and Zola were pals back in Aix-en-Provence before heading off for Paris.]
p112 ... [Zola] was the proud founder of naturalism, a new school of literature that aspired to write "the scientific novel." The novelist, Zola declared, must literally become a scientist, "employing the experimental method in their study of man."
...Zola based his fiction [L'Oeuvre (The Masterpiece)] on a story stolen straight from real life. The life he stole this time was the life of his best friend. After the novel was published, in the spring of 1886, Cézanne and Zola never spoke...
...
But the real insult came when Zola [in the novel] described Claude's (Cézanne's) art. His abstract paintings, Zola wrote, were nothing but "wild mental activity . . . the terrible drama of a mind devouring itself." Sondoz's (Zola's) novels, on the other hand, "describe man as he really is." They are a new literature for the coming century of science."
...If Cézanne's paintings made our subjectivity their subject, Zola's novels were determined to turn man into just another object. The artist, Zola said, must "disappear, and simply show what he has seen. The tender intervention of the writer weakens a novel, and introduces a strange element into the facts which destroys their scientific value."
To be continued...
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