Seeing Picasso, Fixing Cézanne

About the Book

The works of Pablo Picasso and Paul Cézanne are based on particular ways of seeing. To understand these, we begin with ordinary vision. I open my eyes, and light streams through the lenses and forms pictures on my retinas. From these tiny pictures, my brain places before me a life-size, lens-projected, stable, upright, continuous picture of objects in space, the visual world. I recognize this world as the real world even though I know it is an event in my brain, a virtual reality. But how do those tiny pictures come to be the world around me? Part of my answer would be the imagined scaled to the visual world presence I have, in relation to which I see the visual world. I call what is an imagined generalized image of my face my visual ego.

About the Author

Peter Moak received a PhD in art history from the University of Pennsylvania and taught art history at the University of New Hampshire. This guide is the product fifty years of trying to better understand looking at art. This effort began with the work of Gauguin, Cézanne, and Picasso and lead in time to the importance visual ego for seeing and making art and to numerous discoveries about the history of art and the way see art.