Cezanne and the stereometric perception

Paul Cézanne and his Revoluionary Optics

Video by Waldemar Januszczak (youtube 5:49)

This is the studio of Cézanne Build for himself just outside Aix so he can paint out here in the countryside whit no distractions, it been kept more less as he left it. Inside here Cézanne produced some of the most revolutionary pictures in the story of art using only the simplest ingredients. All he needed was a bag of apples and a new way of looking. The middle of 19 century was the great era of optical discovery, all sorts of remarkable things were found out about vision. What actually happens to the eyes when we see something? What does looking actually involve? It was an English man Charles Wheatstone who first described stereovision in 1838. Until then, no one had bothered to ask themselves why human beings have two eyes. Why don’t we just have one big eye right here in the middle. Wouldn’t that be more practical more visually economical. No actually, because the reason we have to eyes is that with two eyes we can see in stereo and judge distances more exactly. That why people who lose an eye have difficult in the beginning driving because they can’t judge distances as well and this had huge artistically implications particularly for Cézanne. If you stare hard at these apples I bought in the shop down the road you’ll notice that each eye sees them differently. The left eye sees them from over here, the right eye from over here. If I now combine these two views through the magic of television I’ll get a crude Cesannesh blurring. An optical tipsiness that saw Cézanne. What Cesanne realized was that traditional single point prospective where everything is arranged in a line in front of you like that was wrong. What we actually do is see in stereo through two eyes each of which sees things from slightly different angles. The brain then combines this two images in a single view. It is a momentous discovery. Traditional prospective was under attack. Outside Cèsanne’s studio just up here, a short climb away, he painted on of his famous views (the Moulsanne beat wah) and explored another fascinating optical phenomenon discovered by the underrated Charles Wheatstone, who invented this contraption here the pseudo scope. What this thing does is swap around all your optical information. So what you usually see in your left eye is moved to the right eye and vice-versa. As a result of swapping your eyes around, concave shapes become convex and convex shapes become concave. Everything is reversed. Unfortunately, it’s totally impossible for me to show you that. There is no way I can feed separate information to both your eyes. What you have to imagine is that one of these, the human face, becomes a mask which you see like that. Backgrounds and foregrounds swap places the entire relationship of far to near is challenged. Cesanne also challenges it in his superb tussles with the mountains that obsessed him: the moths anvi toir. So did he actually use one of these? I don’t think so, he wasn’t a man for gadgets. But he would definitely have known about it. Optical discovery was in the air and everything the Impressionist did was informed by it. And if you stare at this landscape as intensely as relentlessly as Cesanne did, sooner or later, it’ll start to shimmer and coalesce, until it reveals its deeper truth.