As Seen: Modern British Painting and Visual Experience
- Submitting institution
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Cardiff Metropolitan University / Prifysgol Metropolitan Caerdydd
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- AD020
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
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- Title of journal
- Tate Papers
- Article number
- -
- First page
- 0
- Volume
- 23
- Issue
- -
- ISSN
- 1753-9854
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2015
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Research process
Artists have long been preoccupied with the problem of how to represent visual experience. It is often claimed that the problem was solved by the discovery of linear perspective based on well-understood principles of geometry and the behaviour of light. During the twentieth century several important British artists began to paint features of visual experience rarely ever painted before, including subjective curvature, double vision and the body seen from the first person viewpoint. In doing so they broke with hundreds of years of pictorial convention based on linear perspective, yet their experiments remain largely unrecognised. This research integrates knowledge and methods from art history and vision science in order to shed new light on this topic.
Research insights
This research reveals how a number of British artists during the twentieth century looked afresh at the question of how to depict visual perception and produced novel answers. It shows how artists resisted the weight of a pictorial tradition based on the logic of linear perspective, and began to record properties of vision rarely recorded before. Many of the works produced as a result of these experiments remain obscure, and little attempt has been made to analyse their content or locate them in their art historical context. One reason, perhaps, is that it is not easy to see what these artists achieved without sufficient knowledge of visual perception and without direct experience of trying to depict it. By linking these insights from the science of visual perception to the art historical analysis this research generates new knowledge on these questions.
Dissemination
This paper was published by Tate Research, a world leading open access art history journal and the main findings presented at a workshop held at the National Museum of Wales in 2015, which included contributions from leading art historians.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
