Foreword: Science as the Artist's Muse / Neil deGrasse Tyson -- 1. Art in Pursuit of the Absolute: German Romanticism -- 2. The industrial revolution -- 3. Adopting a Scientific Worldview -- 4. French Realist Art of Observation -- 5. German Abstract Art of Contemplation -- 6. Biology and art at the Fin-de-Siècle -- 7. Looking Inward: Art and the Human Mind -- 8. The Culmination of Newton's Clockwork Universe -- 9. Einstein's Space-Time Universe and Quantum Mechanics -- 10. A Non-Euclidean, Expanding Universe -- 11. Surrealist Science: Psychoanalysis and Physics -- 12. The Atomic Sublime -- 13. The Computer and Post-1945 Geometric Art -- The Wholeness of Nature : Science and Art in the Early 21st Century.
Summary:
How science changed the way artists understand reality. Exploring the Invisible shows how modern art expresses the first secular, scientific worldview in human history. Now fully revised and expanded, this richly illustrated book describes two hundred years of scientific discoveries that inspired French Impressionist painters and Art Nouveau architects, as well as Surrealists in Europe, Latin America, and Japan. Lynn Gamwell describes how the microscope and telescope expanded the artist's vision into realms unseen by the naked eye. In the nineteenth century, a strange and exciting world came into focus, one of microorganisms in a drop of water and spiral nebulas in the night sky. The world is also filled with forces that are truly unobservable, known only indirectly by their effects--radio waves, X-rays, and sound-waves. Gamwell shows how artists developed the pivotal style of modernism--abstract, non-objective art--to symbolize these unseen worlds. Starting in Germany with Romanticism and ending with international contemporary art, she traces the development of the visual arts as an expression of the scientific worldview in which humankind is part of a natural web of dynamic forces without predetermined purpose or meaning. Gamwell reveals how artists give nature meaning by portraying it as mysterious, dangerous, or beautiful. With a foreword by Neil deGrasse Tyson and a wealth of stunning images, this expanded edition of Exploring the Invisible draws on the latest scholarship to provide a global perspective on the scientists and artists who explore life on Earth, human consciousness, and the space-time universe.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.