Luis Buñuel, Un Chien Andalu, 1928. Screenshot (public domain).

Cataracts

About a month ago, and then again two weeks after that, I had surgery at the NHS to remove cataracts – those are clouded or yellowed lenses behind the iris and pupil. I’m a bit young for this common procedure, but sun exposure hastens cataract formation, and I lived for fifteen years in Southern California and five more in Florida. I didn’t know I had them until my optician told me, but I should have known – I hadn’t needed sunglasses in years and my night vision had gotten bad.

Cataract removal is simple. The surgeon starts by anaesthetizing the eye with drops and propping open the lid, like with young Alex in A Clockwork Orange. A scalpel slices and dices the cataract, and then a sort of vacuum cleaner sucks it away. After that, the doctor inserts a new lens. It sounds grim but wasn’t. In fact, it was like an acid trip. Lying back in the chair, I saw at first a fuzzy quatrefoil of lights, then tides of water, followed by a squeegee wiping my eyeball clean, and then the insertion and unfolding of a lens that was initially a kaleidoscope, and then a spyglass revealing the crisp contours of the lights and surgical equipment above me. It’s been 50 years since I last took LSD; I made a mental note to try it again sometime.

After each operation, I was a bit wobbly, but my wife Harriet steadied me, and we easily walked the mile or so back to our hillside flat in Norwich. That night and for the next two days I experienced what doctors euphemistically call “discomfort” as well as fuzzy vision. After a few more days, and with the help of eye drops, the symptoms passed.

In the two-week interval between my first and second surgeries I experienced an optical revelation. What was dull in my left, untreated eye, was blazingly bright in my right! What was grey in one was white in the other. It wasn’t just light and tone; colors changed too. A yellow that appeared dun-colored in my left eye, was lemony in the other. A green that was bronze in my left was grassy in the right. Navy blue became azure; Earth-red, fire engine red, and so on. After the second surgery, the contrast between the two eyes disappeared. But I knew I was seeing different than before.

Everybody who has cataract surgery notices the change – that’s the whole point. But because I’m an art historian, and a significant part of my work consists of observing subtle distinctions of color in works of art, the change in my vision felt especially dramatic. I have in my 45-year career written at length and taught about Delacroix, Monet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Seurat. All were great colorists. Had I for the last decade or so – when my cataracts were worsening – misunderstood their works, and seen them mostly as drawn rather than painted and colored? Had I been blind to them? Was that why I’ve been writing so much about politics lately, instead of art? I resolved to go to Paris–Delacroix is badly represented in British museums – to begin to find out.

Visiting the Louvre

I first went to the Louvre in 1974 when I was 18. I took the night plane from JFK to Reykjavik via Icelandic Air — the Hippie express — then changed planes for the flight to Luxembourg, followed by a train to Pairs. The round-trip fare was $250; the train about $20. I stayed at the Hotel des Grandes Ecole on the Rue Cardinal Lemoine, near the Pantheon. It cost 35 francs a night (seven dollars), croissant breakfast included, with an extra franc for a hot water shower in a closet off the stairwell. The place was a picturesque fleabag – today it’s picturesque and luxurious. The Louvre, in my recollection, was half empty in those days. You could enter the museum at any number of places – this was pre-I.M. Pei’s Pyramid — and wander for hours undisturbed by guides and tour groups. Some galleries were dimly lit, many of the pictures were dirty or poorly conserved — it was glorious.

In the subsequent five decades, I probably visited Paris and the Louvre about 15 times, though with decreasing frequency in recent years. The crowds and queues, especially in warm weather months, are daunting. But the trip from Norwich to Paris via the Eurostar is cheap and fast, and I was determined last week, to perform my eye test.

Michelangelo’s marble Slaves (or Captives) were no different than I remembered them; the marble was whiter, but the pathos the same. Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and Titian’s Le Concert Champêtre were also familiar – they are afflicted with their own, internal cataract. The yellowed varnish of the latter makes it appear as if the orgy was taking place on a smoggy day in San Bernardino. Veronese’s Wedding at Cana was just as grand and arresting as I remembered. Jacques Louis David called it “the greatest picture in the world” and Delacroix said he never missed a chance to see it when he........

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