The Artist’s Eyeball

Paintings are like a visual history; a snapshot of an era, a mind, a mood. Fine-art critics look to the colors, brushstrokes, scenes and objects for a story of politics, philosophy and personality. Take the brash, rebellious colors of the fauvists, the antiestablishment off-kilter perspectives of cubism, or the radically rough and outdoorsy landscapes of impressionism.

Stanford University ophthalmologist Michael Marmor sees the story slightly differently. For the past quarter century he has looked beyond the artist’s imaginative eye, to the physiology of their actual eyesight. By combing through personal medical records and mimicking eye diseases with computer simulations, Marmor has attempted to chart how eye degeneration affected the work of artists from Edgar Degas to Georgia O’Keefe. “Art historians look at art through culture, movements, things they read about the artist. That’s all you need, historians say, that’s all the artist was trying to do,” Marmor says. But how can you ignore what they actually saw?

Combining art and medicine came naturally to Marmor. He grew up in Los Angeles during the 1950s, just as the epicenter of avant garde art moved from Europe and landed squarely in the United States. As a child, he scuttled around a house filled with the works of local artists, amassed slowly by his parents. His father was, of course, a physician. In time, the Marmors assembled an impressive collection of modern works by Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. He shook hands with many modernists in his youth, and whiled away countless afternoons in art museums.

Despite his bohemian upbringing, Marmor never wanted to be an artist. He studied math at Harvard and later received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School. Marmor joined the faculty at Stanford in 1974 after a handful of years researching giant sea slug physiology at the National Institutes of Health in D.C.

In his classroom, art and science dovetailed. He used famous artworks to teach students about vision. “Vision is rooted in contrast,” he says. “The retina codes information based on contrast and edges, and the degree of vision depends on the contrast.” In the same way, he says, impressionists used light to create contrast, to describe what they saw. And when they could no longer see well, when light was no longer reaching the retina in the same way, the messages were wrongly coded, and their painting changed.

Soon after he came to Stanford, Marmor began thinking about what artists saw as their eyesight changed. It wasn’t a singular event that set him on this course, but an amalgamation of observations and conversations.

Some of his early musings with fellow ophthalmologist James Ravin led to his 1997 art book The Eye of the Artist. The book describes the visual maladies of great artists of many eras, from Vincent van Gogh to O’Keefe. But it also addresses how artists in their healthy years use light and color to create their works. The book was a framework for his recent studies of what Degas and Claude Monet saw through their failing eyes.

By the age of 36, Degas had lost much of his eyesight. Most medical evidence of his problems has long since disappeared, but Marmor believes a retinal disease may have blurred his vision without affecting his sense of color. From letters and writings, he says, he learned that Degas had lost his visual acuity, and his pastels and paintings reflected this with rough edges and blurred lines.

To approximate how Degas’s changing eyesight affected his painting, Marmor fired up his copy of Adobe Photoshop. He created a series of image filters reconstructing the progress of fading visual sharpness, ending with one that approximates 20/200 vision, which qualifies as legal blindness in the U.S. He applied the filters to three of Degas’s bathing nudes. The first nude is clear and crisp; it’s from 1886, when his eyes were still normal. By the time we reach the oldest painting, from 1905, the lines are scratchy, the woman’s head a blur, her ear nowhere to be found. Her back dissolves into the sheet she is sitting upon. The contrast is lost. With the murky filter applied on top, it’s amazing he was able to construct a form at all.

“Degas produced coarser shading lines and less refinement in the outlining of his subjects,” Marmor writes. “This blurring of the works, given Degas’ particular style, may have encouraged him to continue to paint with failing vision and accounted in part for his acceptance of - or at least willingness to complete - works that seem curiously crude to our unblurred eyes.”

Degas was not the only impressionist with famously fading eyes. Claude Monet suffered from cataracts – a fairly common eye disease whereby the lens becomes cloudy and sensitive to glare. Symptoms are often described as if the patient is looking through a foggy window. Many people, including Monet, lose the ability to see colors. “He bitterly complained,” says Marmor, “that the world was all yellow, the world was all blue.” Monet’s cataracts destroyed his sense of color profoundly; he was forced to memorize the layout of colors on his palette. After his cataract surgery, at age 83, wearing thick glasses, he was finally able to see his previous work. They were so different from his early life, says Marmor, they most likely would have sold in name only. Monet destroyed many of the works; a few pieces were salvaged by friends and family.

Using a similar technique as for Degas, Marmor created filters that recreated how Monet saw colors. He applied the filters to several of Monet’s works, including a pair painted during his worst eye health in the years prior to 1924. Both depict the same Japanese bridge at Giverny, nearly unrecognizable in the murk of muddy colors and heavy brush strokes. One is painted in orange tones, the other in blues. With Marmor’s filter they look exactly the same.

Marmor thinks this sort of analysis, which he is planning for Mary Cassat and Georgia O’Keefe next, will add meaningful discussion in art circles, giving a glimpse, quite literally into an artist’s eye. “It’s a tool of empathy,” he says. “Monet’s letters told about his turmoil. It’s easy to read about it without it sinking in.”

The work is interesting, says Hilarie Faberman, curator of Stanford’s Cantor Museum, but it will be a long time before anything like this will be considered conclusive. The Cantor houses many works from the Marmor family’s collection. “It’s a bit of a presumption to say, ‘This is the way Degas saw.’ He had difficulty seeing when he got older – How can you draw the line between vision and style?” There is a recognized “older style,” Faberman says, that historians attribute to artists in their later years, independent of their physical failings. But maybe physical ailments are indeed the fundamental of such altered artistic styling?

It’s unlikely that the art world will change its steadfast opinions based on Marmor’s work. But that doesn’t bother him. By now, he’s used to looking at things a little differently.