An Eye for Painting

Inbunden bok. Munch-Museum / The Munch-Ellingsen Group, Paris. 2006. 191 s. Inbunden. 29x25cm. 1340 gram.

Nära nyskick. Skyddsomslag finns i mycket gott skick. Does knowledge about the eye and the way it works helps us to understand painting ? Conversely, does looking at paintings shed light on the mysteries of sight ? And how do painters go about transferring to canvas an image that they receive via the eye ? This book attemps to answer these questions. We have the impression that our eyes provide us with a faithful image of the world we inhabit. And yet we know that it is not the case, and that the visual world we perceive is not the world of physical reality. Painting offers a unique means of verifying this, for the painted image on a canvas is not an objective reproduction like a photograph, but rather the projection of the artist's subjective vision. "Nature is a hypothesis", said Raoul Dufy, and a painting enables us to appreciate the disparency between what we know and what we see. A figurative painting is nohing other than a manually created image of a visual illusion. A study of painting by an ophthalmologist is also a edical study and inevitably touches on pathologies. This book looks at how visual defects have influenced the approach, style, and behavior of artists with eye disorders, examining the work of such famous painters as Edvard Munch, Edgar Degas and Claude Monet.