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. He has received grants from the AHRB (now AHRC), Leverhulme Trust, and British Academy.

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 is no longer accepting 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 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. He is also working on the online catalogue of the Cezanne paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago, and on essays for exhibitions at the Musée Granet, Courtauld Galleries, and Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest of Cezanne, Seurat, and Gauguin. 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). In 1996 he wrote a book for the Tate Gallery, London on Cezanne, which sold 70,000 copies. And in 2016, he made a video ifor the National Gallery, London for their Delacroix exhibition.

In 2021, Paul completed a book on the science, perception, and depiction of coloured shadows. Between September 2021 and August 2023 he had a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to work on the project: Unfolding Vision: Cezanne’s ‘way of seeing’. This drew 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. The project has now been extended to investigate how Cezanne's work gives shape to an autistic way of being.

Selected publications

• 'Looking Slowly with Cezanne', The Burlington Magazine, vol. 165, no. 1441 (April 2023), 422-435.
• 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