Still Life with Fruit Dish (1879-80)
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.
They seemed to offer a radical new way of seeing, even though no one could explain exactly how.
In 1881, Paul Gauguin joked about how to extract Cézanne's mysterious methods, instructing Camille Pissarro to "ply him with one of those mysterious homeopathic drugs and come straight to Paris to share the information".
The painter and critic Maurice Denis shared a sense of bewilderment about Cézanne's revolution in visual representation, writing in 1912 that he had "never heard an admirer… give me a clear and precise account of his admiration."
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.
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