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Claude Monet was so enchanted with natural light, he painted series of haystacks, poplars, and the cathedral at Rouen. Throughout the day, he'd move from canvas to canvas, painting the same subject under different light and atmospheric conditions.

By his late 60s, his vision was deteriorating.

"Reds appeared muddy to me, pinks insipid, and the intermediate or lower tones escaped me," he said in a 1918 interview when he was 78. "What I painted was more and more dark, more and more like an ‘old picture,' and when the attempt was over I compared it to former works, I would be seized by a frantic rage and slash all my canvases with my penknife."

Vision and how it affects both the making and viewing of art is the topic of the new The Artist's Eyes: Vision and the History of Art by James Ravin, an ophthalmologist who lives in Sylvania Township, and Michael Marmor, a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine in California.

The handsome, 223-page hardcover retails for $40 at area bookstores and the Toledo Museum of Art. Packed with images, it's also a primer in the mechanics of vision. It answers questions such as why we need glasses, how do the eyes process information, why some paintings shimmer, and why the eyes in some portraits seem to follow us? Also, how do artists such as M.C. Escher trick the eye? And did the frequent use of yellow in Van Gogh's paintings stem from the digitalis medicine he took?

‘The Dancers’ (about 1899) by Edgar Degas, who lost his central vision but could see peripherally. All of the paintings are in the collection of the Toledo Museum of Art.
( TOLEDO MUSEUM OF ART )

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A Toledo native, as a boy Ravin studied art at the museum. At the University of Michigan, he majored in art history and pre-med. Attending UM's medical school, he worked with medical illustrators whenever he had the chance.

He, like co-author Marmor, had written many articles in medical journals. Marmor, a neuro-physiologist, studies nerve cells of the retina, considered the "film" in the ocular camera.

"The retina in the eye is really a part of the brain, part of the central nervous system. We think in our eyes," he said in a phone interview with The Blade. "The retina separates what we see into small regions of context."

Years ago, Marmor attended a talk on eye diseases of artists by Ravin at an American Academy of Ophthalmology meeting. They struck up a friendship and collaborated on a 1997 book, The Eye of the Artist, aimed at medical professionals.

Written for a general audience, the new book expands on the earlier work.

Eyes and art
Ravin speaks French. He loves 19th-century French painters and during a half-dozen trips to France has studied them, read their letters and medical records, and accumulated stories of their vision challenges. He's drawn to Monet, a founder of Impressionism.

Born in 1840, Monet had adequate vision until his late 60s when his sight gradually became foggy in one eye and nearly absent in the other. The book shows side-by-side paintings of the same rose-lined path in his garden: one from 1902 provides a softly recognizable image with shadows and light. The other, done about 20 years later with far poorer sight, is an abstract blur of reds and yellows, colors a person with cataracts may be able to see.

"The short wavelength colors, violets and blues, are washed out. What tends to predominate are the reds and the browns," Ravin said.

Terrified of cataract surgery, Monet refused it for decades, but his friend, the statesman Georges Clemenceau, talked him into it, reminding him of his promise to complete his 250-piece water lily series, which would be his contribution to rebuilding France after World War I.

At 83, Monet finally went under the knife, and in recuperation, he was an ornery patient who had to be restrained from ripping off bandages. He regained decent vision in the right eye. "I am happily seeing everything again and I am working with ardor," he wrote his doctor.

The octogenarian retouched earlier paintings and spent hours at his beloved garden pond 50 miles north of Paris, brushing yards of canvas with water lilies.

Central vision
Cataracts and macular degeneration can result in blurred vision, altered color perception, sensitivity to light and glare, and impaired depth perception.

Mary Cassatt, an American living in France, gradually lost her sight due to cataracts. She adapted by painting with pastel crayons that are easier to manipulate than oils, but eventually became blind. Monet knew that her cataract surgery had been unsuccessful.

In 1870 at the age of 36, Edgar Degas lost the central vision in his right eye: he could see peripherally but had a blind spot in the middle. The same thing happened to left eye when he was in his 50s.

"Central vision is our vision for seeing things in sharp detail. Peripheral vision is more blurred," said Ravin.

Sunlight bothered him, and during a trip to New Orleans when Degas was 39, the light was unbearably bright. He sometimes made a sketch outside and completed the painting indoors.

The book shows three of his ballet-dancer pastels from 1884, 1898, and 1910-12. In the earliest, the young dancers are carefully drawn and shaded; the second shows less precision in outline, facial features, dress, and shading. The last, done in Degas's late 70s, has two blurred figures lacking recognizable features and against a garish yellow background. Yellow is often a color most seen by people with cataracts.

Teasing out how much the changes in Degas' art is due to his failing vision and how much can be attributed to stylistic changes, is tricky, noted Ravin. "But we know that his vision was severely impaired due to the retinal loss.''

Experimenting with several media, Degas found pastels and sculpture let him work quickly and broadly.

Shading and detail
Like most people, Charles Meryon adapted to his limitations. Born in France in 1821, he quit the navy to embrace his passion for art. He quickly realized he didn't see colors as others did, but hoped to learn to do so. He didn't, of course, but he found success in etching, with its stark contrasts of black and white, and he created terrific prints of Parisian scenes.

A few of his paintings remain, including the beautiful Ghost Ship (Ship in a Storm); they have scant reds and greens, the colors that give people who have color-deficiency the most trouble.

Georgia O'Keeffe, who died in 1986 at the age of 99, hated talking about her loss of vision due to macular degeneration that began in her 70s. A New Mexico ophthalmologist wrote of her: "She would arrive unannounced in my waiting room in her nun-like outfit, looking like Queen Victoria, and regally inform my staff that she would be seen momentarily. My other patients seemed to tolerate this intrusion with good humor."

Her later paintings are less subtle in shading and detail than earlier ones, the authors point out. She turned to pottery, which she could judge by its feel.

A chapter at the end of the book simulates what Monet and Degas probably saw as their vision failed — muddy gardens for Monet and fuzzy images of nude bathers posing for Degas.

Other chapters explain light and dark, pointillist and pixelated images, the role of edges in perception, how we code vision, and perspective. Especially interesting are discussions of M.C. Escher's interlocking light-dark figures that blur distinction between object and background, and British Op artist Bridget Riley's intriguing visuals.

Why do some paintings appear to shimmer? It occurs when an artist juxtaposes colors that differ on the color scale (such as red and yellow or red and green), but share the same degree of relative brightness.

And why do the eyes in some portraits seem to follow us?

"It's actually pretty simple," said Marmor. The whites of the eyes on either side of the pupils are fairly equal, and the middle of the nose is shown.

Contact Tahree Lane at:
tlane@theblade.com
or 419-724-6075.

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