Exploring the Invisible

Art, Science and the Spirtual

Lynn Gamwell

344 pages, parution le 04/08/2004

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Résumé

This sumptuous and stunningly illustrated 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. Exploring the Invisible 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.

Lynn Gamwell 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. For example, a German physiologist's famous demonstration that color is not in the world but in the mind influenced Monet's revolutionary painting with light. As the first wave of enthusiasm for science crested, abstract art emerged in Brussels and Munich. By 1914, it could be found from Moscow to Paris.

Throughout the book are beautiful images from both science and art--some well known, others rare--that reveal the scientific sources mined by Impressionist and Symbolist painters, Art Nouveau sculptors and architects, Cubists, and other nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists.

With a foreword by astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson, Exploring the Invisible appears in an age when both artists and scientists are exploring the deepest meanings of life, consciousness, and the universe.

L'auteur - Lynn Gamwell

Lynn Gamwell is Director of the Art Museum at the State University of New York, Binghamton; Curator of the Gallery of Art and Sciences at the New York Academy of Sciences; and Adjunct Professor of the Humanities and Sciences at the School of Visual Arts, New York. She is the coauthor of Dreams 1900-2000 and Health and Happiness in Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde Art.

Sommaire

Art in Pursuit of the Absolute Romanticism
Adopting a Scientific Worldview
The French Art of Observation: A Cool Rejection of Darwin
German and Russian Art of the Absolute: A Warm Embrace of Darwin
Loving and Loathing Science at the Fin De Siecle
Looking Inward: Art and the Human Mind
Wordless Music and Abstract Art
The Culmination of Newton's Clockwork Universe
Einstein's Space-Time Universe
Abstract Art With a Cosmic Perspective
Surrealist Science
The Atomic Sublime
The Disunity of Nature Postmodern Art, Science, and the Spiritual

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Caractéristiques techniques

	PAPIER
Éditeur(s)	Princeton University Press
Auteur(s)	Lynn Gamwell
Parution	04/08/2004
Nb. de pages	344
Format	24 x 28
Couverture	Broché
Poids	1556g
Intérieur	Quadri
EAN13	9780691121123
ISBN13	978-0-691-12112-3