Samiul Bashar Samin
In 1906, Pablo Picasso was determined to reinvent the portrait and push the boundaries of realism, and one of his early subjects was Gertrude Stein. After months in his Paris studio, carefully reworking the paint on the canvas, Picasso still wasn’t satisfied. He didn’t finish the painting until after a trip to Spain.
What Picasso saw there that affected him so deeply has been debated—the ancient Iberian art, the weathered faces of Spanish peasants—but his style changed forever. When he returned to Paris, he gave Stein the head of a primitive mask. The perspective was flattened and her face became a series of dramatic angles. Picasso had intentionally misrepresented various aspects of her appearance, turning the portrait into an early work of cubist caricature.
Despite the artistic license, the painting is still recognizable as Stein. Picasso took her most distinctive features—those heavy, lidded eyes and long, aquiline nose—and exaggerated them. Through careful distortion, he found a way to intensify reality. As Picasso put it, “Art is the lie that reveals the truth.”
What’s surprising is that such distortions often make it easier for us to decipher what we’re looking at, particularly when they’re executed by a master. Studies show we’re able to recognize visual parodies of people—like a cartoon portrait of Richard Nixon—faster than an actual photograph. The fusiform gyrus, an area of the brain involved in facial recognition, responds more eagerly to caricatures than to real faces, since the cartoons emphasize the very features that we use to distinguish one face from another. In other words, the abstractions are like a peak-shift effect, turning the work of art or the political cartoon into a “super-stimulus.”
The artist is, in a sense, a neuroscientist, exploring the potentials and capacities of the brain, though with different tools. Picasso had an intuitive understanding of the mechanics of vision—which he expressed in his paintings. Likewise, the power of a Rembrandt self-portrait is not an accident: The Old Masters knew how to captivate the eye and the mind, which is why we still gaze at their canvases in museums.
There will always be something mysterious about the visceral power of a Picasso or the perplexing smile of the Mona Lisa—but that doesn’t mean the mystery can’t be probed. By articulating the universals of painting and sculpture, the neuroaestheticians allow us to better understand what transforms a mass of brushstrokes into a masterpiece.