Darwin Becomes Art
Darwin Becomes Art

Author: Hugh Ridley

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2014-05-10

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 940121090X

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This book analyses Darwin’s influence on art and the effect of his science on experiences of beauty. The first chapter discusses Darwin’s great forerunner, Alexander von Humboldt, and his contribution to thinking about the relationship between science and beauty. The second examines the public reception of Darwin in Germany, focusing on the German Naturalists and the important scientific controversies which Darwin’s idea provoked. It shows the political use of science (Häckel and Virchow) and foreshadows present-day debates between Darwinism and Creationism, science and an idealized view of nature. Against this background the book shows the effect of Darwin on three important fields: the perception of landscape in major writers (Zola, Lawrence, Jacobsen, Benn and Brecht) before 1920; the portrayal of wild life, as revealed in bird-painting; and the understanding of the relationship between the human body and character. The book brings together for the first time Darwin’s The Expression of Emotion with the work of major European novelists (Eliot, Gutzkow and Freytag), focusing on the place of the older understandings contained in physiognomy, which Darwin challenged, on the portrayal of ethnicity, and on debates about acting, including for the young Brecht.

The Seductions of Darwin
The Seductions of Darwin

Author: Matthew Rampley

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2017-01-12

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 0271079002

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The surge of evolutionary and neurological analyses of art and its effects raises questions of how art, culture, and the biological sciences influence one another, and what we gain in applying scientific methods to the interpretation of artwork. In this insightful book, Matthew Rampley addresses these questions by exploring key areas where Darwinism, neuroscience, and art history intersect. Taking a scientific approach to understanding art has led to novel and provocative ideas about its origins, the basis of aesthetic experience, and the nature of research into art and the humanities. Rampley’s inquiry examines models of artistic development, the theories and development of aesthetic response, and ideas about brain processes underlying creative work. He considers the validity of the arguments put forward by advocates of evolutionary and neuroscientific analysis, as well as its value as a way of understanding art and culture. With the goal of bridging the divide between science and culture, Rampley advocates for wider recognition of the human motivations that drive inquiry of all types, and he argues that our engagement with art can never be encapsulated in a single notion of scientific knowledge. Engaging and compelling, The Seductions of Darwin is a rewarding look at the identity and development of art history and its complicated ties to the world of scientific thought.

Darwin
Darwin

Author: Pamela Kort

Publisher:

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13:

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"The exhibition is the first to focus on the implications of Darwinism for the fine arts. All of the artists featured in the exhibition shared an interest in the natural sciences and either read texts by Darwin or by those who reacted to him. With approximately 150 paintings, drawings, and lithographs as well as rare documentary material, the exhibition showcases artists such as Martin Johnson Heade, František Kupka, Odilon Redon, George Frederic Watts, Arnold Böcklin, Gabriel von Max, Alfred Kubin, and Max Ernst, and thus spans the period from 1859 to the mid twentieth century."--Schirn Kunsthalle website (viewed July 26, 2009).

Becoming Undone
Becoming Undone

Author: Elizabeth Grosz

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2011-09-12

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 0822350718

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An exciting series combining a strong teenage appeal with a clear structural syllabus.

Bird Painting Between Art and Science
Bird Painting Between Art and Science

Author: Hugh Ridley

Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers

Published: 2024-02-02

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 139842594X

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Have you ever wondered why so many scientific handbooks on birds use paintings rather than photographs, or why the painters Killian Mullarney and Lars Johnson are such significant figures in ornithology? This book gives an account of the 500 years during which bird-painting reached such heights, and it traces the growth of scientific realism in this field. It shows how scientific understanding has shaped the art, and how artistic style has left its mark on the science. Birds cross frontiers unhindered, and the language of painting too knows no national barriers. This book explores the huge contribution of German painting to the international tradition. It looks at the work of great artists – Dürer and Rembrandt. It introduces the fascinating but neglected artists who made the landmark handbooks of the past. It pays tribute to those major figures of the last 150 years who brought the art to its perfection: Josef Wolf and Bruno Liljefors, and looks briefly at the competition with photography at the start of the twentieth century. It reveals the interlocking of art with the science of ornithology, as it was developed by figures such as Buffon and Darwin.

The Early History of Embodied Cognition 1740-1920
The Early History of Embodied Cognition 1740-1920

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2016-01-12

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 9004309039

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This pioneering book evaluates the early history of embodied cognition. It explores for the first time the life-force (Lebenskraft) debate in Germany, which was manifest in philosophical reflection, medical treatise, scientific experimentation, theoretical physics, aesthetic theory, and literary practice esp. 1740-1920. The history of vitalism is considered in the context of contemporary discourses on radical reality (or deep naturalism). We ask how animate matter and cognition arise and are maintained through agent-environment dynamics (Whitehead) or performance (Pickering). This book adopts a nonrepresentational approach to studying perception, action, and cognition, which Anthony Chemero designated radical embodied cognitive science. From early physiology to psychoanalysis, from the microbiome to memetics, appreciation of body and mind as symbiotically interconnected with external reality has steadily increased. Leading critics explore here resonances of body, mind, and environment in medical history (Reil, Hahnemann, Hirschfeld), science (Haller, Goethe, Ritter, Darwin, L. Büchner), musical aesthetics (E.T.A. Hoffmann, Wagner), folklore (Grimm), intersex autobiography (Baer), and stories of crime and aberration (Nordau, Döblin). Science and literature both prove to be continually emergent cultures in the quest for understanding and identity. This book will appeal to intertextual readers curious to know how we come to be who we are and, ultimately, how the Anthropocene came to be.

Interrogations of Evolutionism in German Literature 1859-2011
Interrogations of Evolutionism in German Literature 1859-2011

Author: Nicholas Saul

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-02-08

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 9004427074

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In Interrogations of Evolutionism in German Literature 1859-2011 Nicholas Saul offers the first representative account of German literary responses to Darwinian evolutionism from from Raabe and Jensen via Ernst Jünger and Botho Strauß to Dietmar Dath.

Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture
Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture

Author: Will Abberley

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-06-11

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 1108807542

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Revealing the web of mutual influences between nineteenth-century scientific and cultural discourses of appearance, Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture argues that Victorian science and culture biologized appearance, reimagining imitation, concealment and self-presentation as evolutionary adaptations. Exploring how studies of animal crypsis and visibility drew on artistic theory and techniques to reconceptualise nature as a realm of signs and interpretation, Abberley shows that in turn, this science complicated religious views of nature as a text of divine meanings, inspiring literary authors to rethink human appearances and perceptions through a Darwinian lens. Providing fresh insights into writers from Alfred Russel Wallace and Thomas Hardy to Oscar Wilde and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Abberley reveals how the biology of appearance generated new understandings of deception, identity and creativity; reacted upon narrative forms such as crime fiction and the pastoral; and infused the rhetoric of cultural criticism and political activism.

Survival of the Beautiful
Survival of the Beautiful

Author: David Rothenberg

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2013-01-01

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1408830566

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'The peacock's tail makes me sick!' said Charles Darwin. That's because the theory of evolution as adaptation can't explain why nature is so beautiful. It took the concept of sexual selection for Darwin to explain that, a process that has more to do with aesthetic taste than adaptive fitness. Survival of the Beautiful is a revolutionary new examination of the interplay of beauty, art, and culture in evolution. Taking inspiration from Darwin's observation that animals have a natural aesthetic sense, philosopher and musician David Rothenberg probes why animals, humans included, have an innate appreciation for beauty - and why nature is, indeed, beautiful.

Becoming Art
Becoming Art

Author: Howard Morphy

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-08-28

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1000325482

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Thirty years ago Australian Aboriginal art was little more than a footnote to world art. Today, it is considered to be an important contemporary art movement, often promoted as being connected to a deep cultural past. Becoming Art provides a new analysis of the shifting cultural and social contexts that surround the production of Aboriginal art. Transcending the boundaries between anthropology and art history, the book draws on arguments from both disciplines to provide a unique interdisciplinary perspective that places the artists themselves at the centre of the argument.Western art history has traditionally regarded Aboriginal art as distanced from time and place. Becoming Art uses the recent history of Aboriginal art to challenge some of the presuppositions of western art discourse and western art worlds. It argues for a more cross-cultural perspective on world art history.