by Jon Lackman | 6 December 2007 | Modern, Theory
The recently published book L’Œil-cerveau, written by Éric Alliez with the help of Jean-Clet Martin, seeks to understand modern painting in terms of “hallucination,” “a central notion for the nineteenth century that links artistic creation to ‘psychophysiological’ research”. “[Through close examination] of those works and statements constituting modern painting and the idea of modern art from Delacroix to Cezanne, including Manet, Seurat and Gauguin, we trace … the [changing] relationship between the Eye and the Brain.” which complicated “common philosophical notions of subject and object.”
The book is prefaced by an unusual explanation for its relative paucity of illustrations:
The prohibitive cost of photographic reproduction rights isn’t the only reason for their absence … [We left them out also] to contest the proper role of description in art history and to subvert the relegation, by philosophers of art, of artworks to illustrations. The writing here seeks primarily to explore and map in detail, sometimes in the most minute detail, not so much images but rather the range of an artistic thought in practice (that of the painters we’re studying).
