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28-05-2008
Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science, and the Spiritual
by Lynn Gamwell
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005
344 pp, Paperback
ISBN: 978-0-691-12112-3
About this Book This book shows through words and images how directly, profoundly, and indisputably modern science has transformed modern art. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, a strange and exciting new world came into focus - a world of microorganisms in myriad shapes and colors, prehistoric fossils, bizarre undersea creatures, spectrums of light and sound, molecules of water, and atomic particles. The book reveals that the world beyond the naked eye - made visible by advances in science - has been a major inspiration for artists ever since, influencing the subjects they choose as well as their techniques and modes of representation.
The author traces the evolution of abstract art through several waves, beginning with Romanticism. She shows how new windows into telescopic and microscopic realms - combined with the growing explanatory importance of mathematics and new definitions of beauty derived from science - broadly and profoundly influenced Western art. Art increasingly reflected our more complex understanding of reality through increasing abstraction.
About the Author Lynn Gamwell is Director of the Art Museum at Binghamton University; Curator of the Gallery of Art and Science at the New York Academy of Sciences; and Adjunct Professor of Science at the School of Visual Arts, New York.
Contents Foreword: Science in the Artist's Muse by Neil DeGrasse Tyson 6
Introduction 9
1. Art in the Pursuit of the American Romanticism 13
2. Adopting: a Scientific Worldview 33
3. The French Art of Observation: a Cool Rejection of Darwin 57
4. German and Russian Art of Absolute: a Warm Embrace of Darwin 93
5. Loving and Loothing Science at the Fin de Siècle 111
6. Looking Inward: Art and the Human Mind 129
7. Worldless Music and Abstract Art 149
8. The Culmination of Newton's Clockwork Universe 163
9. Einstein's Space-time Universe 195
10. Abstract Art with a Cosmic Perspective 207
11. Surrealist Science 243
12. The Atomic Subline 259
13. The Disunity of Nature: Postmodern Art, Science, and the Spiritual 281
Notes 308
Chronology 324
Acknowledgments 328
Suggestions for Further Reading 330
Index 333
Picture Credits 343
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7333.html |
