Picasso in the mind’s eye of the beholder: Three-dimensional filling-in of ambiguous line drawings

Medialness and the Perception of Visual Art

“…This intuitive knowledge, apparent for example in drawing techniques, once made explicit can be used to guide more elaborate computational models and perception studies (Koenderink et al, 2012;Tresset and Leymarie, 2013). Our exploration of the use of medialness to study some well-known art works from the 20th century, by Picasso and Matisse, represents an initial step.…”

“…16 is illustrated a series of three Picasso drawings from the 1940s, mainly centered around the female form (originals can be found in the 1950 book by Jean Bouret-Bouret, 1950). These three drawings were used by Koenderink, Van Doorn and Wagemans in their extensive study on cartoon-style line drawings (Koenderink et al, 2012). They produced different analyses of these three drawings, and in particular tried to capture the 3D percepts that human observers report in filling-in the body surfaces in between Picasso's well-delineated bounding contours.…”

“…Our results are in general agreement with theirs. We provide finer detailed analyses as we Koenderink et al, 2012). Middle row: Contour-based analysis highlighting certain pairings (resulting in medial axis segments) and important circles of curvature (convexities) and external concavities (shown as darken small disks, where the size reflects the significance of the concavity, while the shade/color reflects the type); adapted, with permission from the authors (Koenderink et al, 2012, Fig.…”

Vision, High-Level Theory of

“…A good example is a study by Koenderink et al (2012) with line drawings of human figures made by Picasso in the 1940s. These drawings provide an interesting case study of high-level vision because they contain a lot of white space, which appears to be filled in one's mind when interpreting them as bodily surfaces in particular attitudes (i.e., orientations in space) and because Picasso intentionally combined multiple perspectives in a single drawing, which means that one can never have experienced such an image before.…”

The Development of Expertise in the Visual Arts

“…Some of the most compelling artworks consist of only a few marks yet they communicate information about object identity and 3D form alongside more abstract qualities such as emotion and movement (Koenderink, van Doorn, & Wagemans, 2012;Sayim & Cavanagh, 2011). As a result, expert artists must learn to select visual features that are emotionally, dynamically, or structurally salient within an object or scene.…”