Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science, and the Spiritual

Exploring the Invisible: 

Art, Science, and the Spiritual

by Lynn Gamwell

Book Description

Publication Date: September 30, 2002

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This beautifully illustrated volume is a surprising synthesis of two seemingly disparate cultures: a revealing
look at more than a century of science and the art it has influenced. Gamwell, curator of the Gallery of Art and
Science at the New York Academy of Sciences, brings her rare and expansive view of creativity to bear on the
impulses common to both pursuits. Opening with a consideration of Romanticism, illustrated by Caspar David
Friedrich's lonely "Wanderer above a Sea of Fog," and J.M.W Turner's paintings of light and darkness, Gamwell
gently tugs readers along on a tour of the Western mind. She sees Darwinism as the beginning of a "pursuit
of the absolute" destined to obsess both scientists and artists.

From there, Gamwell tracks the explosive rise of the scientific worldview with hundreds of artworks from the
major movements, pieces that reflect a fascination with exploration and discovery, as well as mixed feelings
about technological advancement. While the influence of science is easier to see in Wassily Kandinsky's
amoeba-like forms or Alexander Calder's constellation mobiles than it is in Jackson Pollock's energetic splashes,
the author draws careful lines from science to painting and sculpture, allowing even art (or science) novices
to appreciate her argument.

Ultimately, Gamwell argues for the direct relationship between scientific knowledge and abstract art, and
after such an eloquent and visually exciting journey, the link is perfectly clear. 156 color and 208 b&w
illustrations.

Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journey

The director of the art museum at SUNY at Binghampton and adjunct science professor at the School of 

Visual Arts, Gamwell attempts to enumerate what we've suspected all along: art, science, and religion are 

entwined in a dance, each affecting the others. Text and images flow nicely from epoch to epoch, as Gamwell 

illustrates the zeitgeists that created some of the world's great ideas. 

one of the first images in the book is a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog, 

which perfectly illustrates the essence of life on the brink of the modern scientific era. From there, the reader 

moves through various art movements and scientific discoveries, culminating in (of course) an image of a cone 

nebula from the Hubble Space Telescope. 

Following the text are notes, a chronology of events, a broad list of suggestions for further reading, and 

a functional index. Small problems of perception occur, such as listing the diagnosis of anorexia nervosa 

in the "spiritual" realm, and there is a lack of spiritual emphasis in general; however, these issues do not 

detract from the book as a whole. Recommended for academic and larger public libraries.

Nadine Dalton Speidel, Cuyahoga Cty. P.L., Parma, OH
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.