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.
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.