Depth Perception - Depth Perception in Art

Depth Perception in Art

Photographs capturing perspective are two-dimensional images that often illustrate the illusion of depth. (This differs from a painting, which may use the physical matter of the paint to create a real presence of convex forms and spatial depth.) Stereoscopes and Viewmasters, as well as 3D films, employ binocular vision by forcing the viewer to see two images created from slightly different positions (points of view). By contrast, a telephoto lens—used in televised sports, for example, to zero in on members of a stadium audience—has the opposite effect. The viewer sees the size and detail of the scene as if it were close enough to touch, but the camera's perspective is still derived from its actual position a hundred meters away, so background faces and objects appear about the same size as those in the foreground.

Trained artists are keenly aware of the various methods for indicating spatial depth (color shading, distance fog, perspective and relative size), and take advantage of them to make their works appear "real". The viewer feels it would be possible to reach in and grab the nose of a Rembrandt portrait or an apple in a Cézanne still life—or step inside a landscape and walk around among its trees and rocks.

Cubism was based on the idea of incorporating multiple points of view in a painted image, as if to simulate the visual experience of being physically in the presence of the subject, and seeing it from different angles. The radical "High Cubist" experiments of Braque and Picasso circa 1909 are interesting but more bizarre than convincing in visual terms. Slightly later paintings by their followers, such as Robert Delaunay's views of the Eiffel Tower, or John Marin's Manhattan cityscapes, borrow the explosive angularity of Cubism to exaggerate the traditional illusion of three-dimensional space. A century after the Cubist adventure, the verdict of art history is that the most subtle and successful use of multiple points of view can be found in the pioneering late work of Cézanne, which both anticipated and inspired the first actual Cubists. Cézanne's landscapes and still lifes powerfully suggest the artist's own highly-developed depth perception. At the same time, like the other Post-Impressionists, Cézanne had learned from Japanese art the significance of respecting the flat (two-dimensional) rectangle of the picture itself; Hokusai and Hiroshige ignored or even reversed linear perspective and thereby remind the viewer that a picture can only be "true" when it acknowledges the truth of its own flat surface. By contrast, European "academic" painting was devoted to a sort of Big Lie that the surface of the canvas is only an enchanted doorway to a "real" scene unfolding beyond, and that the artist's main task is to distract the viewer from any disenchanting awareness of the presence of the painted canvas. Cubism, and indeed most of modern art is a struggle to confront, if not resolve, the paradox of suggesting spatial depth on a flat surface, and explore that inherent contradiction through innovative ways of seeing, as well as new methods of drawing and painting.