Eye of the Beholder:
Perception of Art and the Brain
Eric R. Kandel
Art is not complete without the perceptual and emotional involvement of the viewer—that is, without our response to it. As a neuroscientist and a lover of art, I am fascinated by this response, which results from the interaction of two kinds of unconscious processes in our brain: the innate, universal processes related to sensory perception and the higher-order processes related to personal experiences, memories, and emotions.
Our brain is not a camera that simply replicates an image. It is a creativity machine that takes incomplete information from the outside world and makes it complete. Thus, we not only collaborate with the artist in transforming a two-dimensional likeness on a canvas into a three-dimensional depiction of the visual world, we also interpret what we see on the canvas in personal terms, thereby adding meaning to the painting. Understanding how the brain orchestrates these unconscious processes to create our response to art, known as the “beholder’s share,” is one of the great challenges confronting brain science in the twenty-first century.
The essays in this collection, written for and presented to a variety of audiences over the last decade, vary widely in subject matter, but each focuses on the interaction of art and science and how that interaction shapes the beholder’s share. Together, they highlight how studies of the brain have revealed the unconscious processes underlying our perception of art and how studies of art have advanced our understanding of the psychology and biology of perception.
Our brain is not a camera that simply replicates an image.
The concept of the beholder’s share arose from the free exchange of ideas among artists, art historians, and scientists in early twentieth-century Vienna. Sigmund Freud and the Austrian Expressionist painters Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele explored our unconscious emotional life. Art historian Alois Riegl applied psychological principles to art. And Ernst Kris and Ernst Gombrich incorporated new ideas about perception from psychology and psychoanalysis into art criticism. These psychological insights into perception served as a solid footing for a bridge between the visual perception of art and biology.
The expressionist painter Chaim Soutine captured the existential anxiety of everyday life for European Jews in the 1920s and 1930s by exaggerating and distorting reality to an unusual degree in his paintings. The asymmetrical faces, strong colors, and thick paint that characterize his portraits not only convey insights into a subject’s psyche but also act on innate visual, tactile, and emotional mechanisms in the viewer’s brain to amplify the beholder’s response.
The three great Viennese modernist artists—Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele—were taken with Darwin’s emphasis on the role of facial expression and bodily movements in conveying emotion, as well as by Freud’s view of the mind and its unconscious processes. Unlike Freud, however, these artists appreciated that women have erotic instincts equal to those of men. In his 1901 painting of Judith and Holofernes, for example, Klimt depicted a woman by fusing eroticism and aggression. Recent studies suggest that the brain circuits regulating these two behaviors are intimately linked.
Portraiture is arguably the most fascinating topic in art from the perspective of brain science. As Darwin pointed out, facial expressions are our primary social signaling system and thus are central to all human interaction. Darwin also held that our ability to form facial expressions and to read the facial expressions of others is innate. Studies of macaque monkeys have since revealed several areas of their brain that are specialized for dealing with faces; similar areas exist in the human brain. Moreover, behavioral studies suggest that there is a powerful link between our brain’s face detection machinery and the areas that control attention, which may account for the allure of portraiture.
Portraiture is arguably the most fascinating topic in art from the perspective of brain science.
The advent of Cubism in the early 1900s presented a radical challenge to our perception of art. Cubism dismantles perspective and shows us several different views of the same object at once. In doing so, it dares our visual system to reconstruct an image that is fundamentally different from the kinds of images our brain has evolved to reconstruct. By subverting the brain’s innate rules of perception, Cubism makes the beholder’s share the essential subject of art.
Sculpture, the oldest of the fine arts, is not simply three-dimensional painting. We actually perceive sculpture differently than we do painting. Sculpture calls into play powerful tactile and kinesthetic sensations. When we look at a sculpture, our visual sensations are translated into sensations of touch, pressure, and grasp. As a result, we do not perceive sculpture as an illusion but engage with it as a real object. We have recently learned that our visual and tactile sensations are closely related. In the early stages of perception, the brain processes only the visual information about a sculpture or a painting. In later stages, it processes both visual and tactile information, resulting in a multisensory representation of the object in the higher regions of the brain.
Research in the field of neuroaesthetics has confirmed that our brain processes abstract art and figurative art differently. Studies have also shown that psychologically distant events (those occurring farther away from us in space or time) are represented more abstractly in our brain than events that occur closer to us. Construal Level Theory posits that these mental representations are flexible; that is, our brain construes objects or events more or less abstractly depending on the context in which they occur. Experimental studies based on this theory suggest that abstract and figurative art have quantifiably different effects on cognition, thus providing a useful new empirical approach to analyzing the beholder’s share.
The groundwork for our understanding of the beholder’s share was laid by the artists, art historians, and psychologists of Vienna in the early 1900s. By the 1950s, advances in the biology of perception, emotion, and empathy had begun to reveal the brain mechanisms that underlie the beholder’s share. The possibility of understanding the human mind in biological terms opened further in the late twentieth century, when cognitive psychology, the science of mind, merged with neuroscience, the science of the brain, resulting in a new biological science of mind. These advances will help us to meet the twenty-first-century challenge of understanding how the unconscious processes in our brain orchestrate our experience of art and, in doing so, will shed light on the brain mechanisms that make creativity possible.
Eric R. Kandel is University Professor Emeritus and professor emeritus of physiology and cellular biophysics, psychiatry, biochemistry, molecular biophysics, and neuroscience at Columbia University, and the author of Essays on Art and Science.