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The Scientific Origins of Abstract Art
"Desmonema," drawn by Ernst Haeckel for the "Challenger" and reprinted in Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature), published by Verlag des Bibliographischen Instituts, 1899-1904 (Photograph by Chris Focht)
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Mystery has shrouded abstract art since it emerged in the late 19th century. Where did it come from? How did shape, color, and line -- in and of themselves -- come to be the vocabulary of the modern painter? I propose that two catalysts contributed to the precipitation of abstract art: the scientific worldview that developed after the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection and the secular concepts of the spiritual that developed thereafter. Darwin forever changed our sense of the universe; what had been static and eternal was now seen as constantly evolving. In the Enlightenment, Isaac Newton cast the universe as a vast, immobile volume of space -- the ether -- in which the stars and planets move slowly and precisely, like a great clock, and Carolus Linnaeus organized the plants and animals of the natural world into a great "chain of being." This metaphor, inherited from Aristotle, positioned all entities in order of ascending complexity, from mineral, plant, and animal to man and ultimately, God.
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"Sonata No. 6 (Sonata of the Stars) Allegro," 1908 (tempera on paper), by Mikalojus K. Curlionis (M.K. Curlionis, National Museum of Art, Kaunas, Lithuania; photograph by A. Baltenas)
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This picture altered dramatically after Darwin presented overwhelming evidence that the links in the chain of being are not rigid but changeable over time. ... This radical shift has long been recognized for its impact on science and culture; but it also infiltrated the visual arts, with the resulting emergence of abstract art as part of the first wave of modern art in the late 19th century. By the 1870s painters were thinking of themselves as organisms responding to light; Monet's landscapes became as fluctuating as the light falling on his retina. New, high-powered microscopes were opening windows into hitherto invisible realms, and by the end of the century Art Nouveau and Jugendstil designers were working in biomorphic styles that captured the new evolutionary concept of life on the cellular level.
As artists in Munich and Moscow were creating the earliest abstract art, based in the new biology, the foundations of physics began to crumble. In the 1890s more windows were flung open into even smaller invisible worlds when X-rays were discovered. In the first decade of the 20th century, scientists realized that the basic building blocks of Newton's clock -- atoms -- are not solid but mainly empty space, and that they are not eternal but transmutable. In the 1920s the public grappled with the concept that the universe itself is in flux; indeed, that the universe is expanding. During the 1920s and '30s, as Albert Einstein's space-time cosmology was replacing Newton's absolute space and time, artists in the second great wave of abstract art expressed the new quantum universe in geometric art and steel-and-glass architecture.
Modern art also responded to the new, secular concepts of the spiritual that were formulated in the 19th century during major changes in religious beliefs. ... A central thread woven into the fabric of modern art is the reformulation of theological questions in secular terms as artists and scientists have searched for new ways to understand the human condition during the first secular, scientific age in human history.
The text is by Lynn Gamwell, director of the Art Museum at the State University of New York at Binghamton, 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. The text and images are from the book Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science, and the Spiritual, to be published next month by Princeton University Press.
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 49, Issue 9, Page B19
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