[Art_beyond_sight_learning_tools] Look at Impressionists’ Failing Vision and Ophthalmology and Art

[Lisa Yayla]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/17/health/17eye.html?ref=science


A New Look at Impressionists’ Failing Vision

The later years of both Claude Monet 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/claude_monet/index.html?inline=nyt-per> 
and Edgar Degas 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/edgar_degas/index.html?inline=nyt-per> 
were marked by failing vision and corresponding changes in the style of 
their paintings, creating an ambivalence about their later work among 
both their contemporaries and today’s critics.
Monet had cataracts 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/cataracts/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> 
that severely limited his color discrimination, which may help explain 
the increasingly muddied tone of his paintings from 1912 to 1923, when 
he had a cataract removed. After his surgery, he destroyed many later 
canvases.
And in Degas’s work, the shading lines and details of the faces became 
increasingly blurred as his disease, probably a form of macular 
degeneration, progressed over 20 years. A French critic called his later 
sketches “the tragic witnesses of the battle of the artist against his 
infirmity.”
In a recent article 
<http://archopht.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/extract/124/12/1764> in The 
Archives of Ophthalmology, Dr. Michael F. Marmor, a professor of 
ophthalmology at Stanford, used computer simulations to create images of 
what these artists might have seen as their vision declined.
“Here we can see ourselves what they were seeing through their eyes,” 
Dr. Marmor said. “Critics have known that these men had failing vision, 
but I don’t think they could appreciate what it meant to these artists. 
It gives both new respect for what they could do with limited vision, 
but also gives us reason to re-examine perhaps what these paintings mean 
in the evolution of these artists’ style and work.”

link to article *Ophthalmology and Art: Simulation of Monet's Cataracts 
and Degas' Retinal Disease
*
*http://archopht.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/124/12/1764
*