[accessibleimage] Simulations of Ailing Artists’ Eyes Yield New Insights on Style

excerpt NY Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/science/04impr.html?_r=1&oref=slogin 
Simulations of Ailing Artists’ Eyes Yield New Insights on Style
For Claude Monet, 1912-22 was a watershed decade. He was perhaps the most successful artist of his time, and his genius had already assured him a place in history.
Artistic Limitations But as he aged, his painting noticeably lost subtlety. Brush strokes became bolder, and colors strikingly blue, orange or brown. His images lost detail and flowed into one another. His days as an avant-garde rebel had long passed, but some critics would later wonder whether the Impressionist was suddenly trying to become an abstract expressionist.
What has long been known about Monet’s later years is that he suffered from cataracts and that his eyesight worsened so much that he painted from memory. He acknowledged to an interviewer that he was “trusting solely to the labels on the tubes of paint and to the force of habit.”
Now, thanks to modern digital techniques, scientists and critics can have a better idea how cataracts changed what Monet saw. This year, an ophthalmologist at Stanford, Michael F. Marmor, described in The Archives of Ophthalmology creating computer simulations of Monet’s world as his lenses yellowed, blurring vision and turning patterns of color and light into muddy, unfocused, yellow-green inkblots.
Although it is impossible to know how Monet wanted his canvases to look, Dr. Marmor’s research suggests that understanding physical infirmity can help assess his work. Whatever Monet intended, his eyes provided little help. “He couldn’t judge what he was seeing or see what he was painting,” Dr. Marmor said. “It is a mystery how he worked.”
Monet was not alone. France in the late 19th and early 20th centuries embraced an astonishing number of important artists who battled serious physical shortcomings — sometimes for decades. Edgar Degas, known for his paintings of nudes and ballet dancers, suffered retinal disease, probably macular degeneration, for nearly half his life. When he died in 1917, his colleague Pierre Auguste Renoir said, “It is fortunate for him ... any conceivable death is better than living the way he was.”
Renoir suffered painful rheumatoid arthritis for more than 30 years, continuing to paint as assistants inserted brushes between his gnarled fingers.
Mary Cassatt, like Monet, had cataracts. Camille Pissarro had a malfunctioning tear duct. Seizures and other nervous disorders tortured and ultimately destroyed Vincent van Gogh.
Over the years, Dr. Marmor and other scientists have studied artists for insights into physical condition’s influences on style and perception. “It made it difficult for them to judge if their art was accomplishing what they intended,” Dr. Marmor said.

Other related posts: