About

Professor Smith came to Warwick in 2005. He has been a visiting professor at UC Berkeley, a visiting scholar and a scholar at the Getty Research Institute, and a summer fellow at the Clark Institute. Paul studied for his PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art under the supervision of Robert Ratcliffe, the eminent but obscure Cezanne scholar. Before that, he took his undergraduate degree at University College London, where he was taught aesthetics by the philosopher, Richard Wollheim. Both have had a lasting influence on his research.

He no longer teaches, and is not accepting any more PhD students. In the past he has supervised PhDs on Baudelaire, Barnett Newman, visual poetry, and Cezanne (all AHRC funded); and he is presently supervising PhDs on Georges Petit, and Venetian colour.

Research interests

Paul works mostly on later nineteenth-century French painting, and the literature of the period. Particular interests include Baudelaire, Manet, Impressionism, Seurat, Cezanne, and stories and novels about art. He is interested in how Adrian Stokes's aesthetic theories, phenomenology, Wittgenstein's thinking, and neuroscience can illuminate pictures. A central focus of this recent work has been colour and colour theory, and he is currently co-editor of the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to Colour.

Paul works closely with galleries and museums. He has written an essay on colour theory to accompany an exhibition in 2025 at the Juan March Foundation in Madrid (to which is also lending a number of books). He is also working on the online catalogue of the Cezanne paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago. In the past, he has written catalogue essays for the Museum of Fine Art, Budapest (2021); the Philips Collection, Washington DC (2014); the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC (2006); the Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence (2006); and the Tate Gallery, London (a book on Cezanne in 1996 which sold 70,000 copies). He also made a video in 2016 for the National Gallery, London for their Delacroix exhibition in 2015.

Paul recently completed a book on the science, perception, and depiction of coloured shadows. In September 2021 Paul began a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to work on the project Unfolding Vision: Cezanne’s ‘way of seeing’. This will draw on recent discoveries in psychology to investigate how the artist's slow and sustained mode of looking was responsible for the so-called distortions formalist critics saw in his work. See a summary in the Leverhulme Trust 2020 Annual Review.

Selected publications

• Painting, Science, and the Perception of Coloured Shadows: 'The Most Beautiful Blue' (Routledge, 2021).
• 'Vermilion, or why Cezanne took the shine off things', Word & Image, vol. 26, no. 1 (2020), 64-79.
• 'Pictorial Grammar: Chomsky, John Willats, and the rules of representation', Art History, 342 (June 2011), 563-93.

View more publications

See his academia.edu page