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"Modern art is an explosion of colors, smooth lines, flat portraits - and it turns out, neuroscience. It also once triggered some strong psychology. A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public," the criticCamille Mauclair, said in outrage over a Paris showing of the artist Henri Matisse's vibrant works. His condemnation today seems more colorful than the paintings themselves, many now hanging in museums all over the world. What was really going on at the turn of the last century to excite such controversy? Brain researchers have increasingly turned their eyes on artists, in an effort to enrich our understanding of how we see art and of the time when paintings could shake society. "When we look at a picture and feel rewarded, we know something is occurring in our brain," says neuroscientist and artist Bevil Conway of Wellesley (Mass.) College. Conway and other neuroscientists, such as Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel, author of the just-released The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, represent the latest voices among brain researchers taking a look at art. "By closely examining artists' paintings and practices, we can discover hints to how the brain works, and achieve insight into the discoveries and inventions of artists and their impact on culture," Conway writes in the current Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, looking at color in the paintings of Matisse , Paul Cezanne and Claude Monet . Public domain Montross Gallery 1915 exhibition catalogue image of 'Gold Fish' by Henri Matisse. Color depends on more than the wavelength of light reaching your eye. Five decades ago, brain researchers thought only the cone-shaped "photoreceptor" cells in the retina determined what colors we see. But we now know that starting from the retina and proceeding through at least five brain regions, our perception of color is shaped not so much by the redness of the paint used to hang an apple from a tree, but