Matt. 1:17
"So all the generations from Abraham to David [are] fourteen generations; and from David until the carrying away into Babylon [are] fourteen generations; and from the carrying away into Babylon unto Christ are fourteen generations."
"Gorilla (Troglodytes gorilla from Gabon) Abducting a Woman," by Emmanuel Frémiet, 1887.
Mr. Rothstein continues: But it is a measure of the achievement of this remarkable exhibition, at the Yale Center for British Art here, that this work is seen differently, as we look at it through Darwinian eyes — as is nearly everything in the show.
Photo: Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon
Chess : "Adam Schaff " "Determinism and Indeterminism"Schaff studied law and economics at the Ecole des Sciences Politiques et Economiques in Paris, and philosophy in Poland, specializing in epistemology. In 1945 he obtained a philosophy degree at Moscow University, and in 1948 he returned to Warsaw University. He has been considered the official ideologue of the Polish United Workers' Party. He also suggested that Wojciech Jaruzelski should obtain the Nobel Peace Prize.
After Stalin's 1953 death, Schaff became close to Leszek Kolakowski's school, which had more of an existentialist and phenomenological slant. Through some of his latter works, he attempted to reconciliate marxist historical determinism with Sartre's existential indeterminism, arguing that man could only become free and able to shape his own life and history as he became conscious of the determinisms to which he is subject. Schaff was a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences and of the Club of Rome.
Dar win’s Wake Splashed Artists, Too
NEW HAVEN — The artist stands in the distance, gazing up at the striated chalk cliffs on the coast of Kent, England. His family is gathering shells in the shallow tidal pools of Pegwell Bay that, with the receding waters, have a look of barren desolation. The sky is an unearthly yellow from the glowering late light of an autumn sun. Above, Donati’s Comet leaves a trail that would not be seen for another two millenniums.
This painting, by William Dyce, “Pegwell Bay, Kent — A Recollection of October 5th, 1858,” and executed soon after that date, is not the kind of work you might expect to see in an exhibition titled “Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts.” And Dyce, who is described as a “deeply devout High Church Anglican,” would hardly have been enamored of the challenge to the clerical interpretation of the Creation that Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” was to make in 1859, just as this canvas was being painted.
But it is a measure of the achievement of this remarkable exhibition, at the Yale Center for British Art here, that this work is seen differently, as we look at it through Darwinian eyes — as is nearly everything in the show. The cliffs and comet and shells allude to the lumbering processes of the ancient earth against which daily experience — the ebb of tides, the attentions of a distracted child in the painting’s foreground, the recollections of the artist himself — plays itself out. The image has an eerie beauty, but it also reflects a gnawing anxiety about the mismatch between the ageless and the temporal, the divine and the mortal, an anxiety not unlike the kind Darwin’s theories can still inspire.
As you walk through this exhibition, mounted in honor of the Darwin bicentennial (and the 150th anniversary of “On the Origin of Species”), you may not learn anything new about his theories, but you will come to see differently, or at least begin to understand that our ways of seeing have evolved because of the power of his vision.
The show claims to be exploring, for the first time, the impact of Darwin’s theories on the visual arts. With a few deft selections and explanations, French Impressionism is shown to have been under the influence. (Degas was fascinated by Darwin’s study comparing facial expressions of animals and humans.) So, too, were the aesthetic movements of the late 19th century, with their visions of feminine beauty. (Sexual selection was one of the themes Darwin turned to in exploring the power of plumage.)
Also in the show are anthropological photographs of “primitive” cultures that Darwin collected ( used by some commentators to affirm a racial form of “social Darwinism,” but also to examine differing notions of beauty), and, of course, images of nature “red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson put it, with animals enacting the battle for survival out of which evolved creatures exquisitely fitted to their habitats. There is one rarely displayed taxidermic specimen from 1851 by John Hancock: a heron that has caught an eel, and is, in turn, bloodied by a falcon.
In some of its examples the show is guilty of exaggeration: not everything here demonstrates a direct influence of Darwinian theory. Some objects reveal ideas at large in the culture, from which Darwin himself had drawn. But this exhibition’s ambitions are greater than just tracing influence. It constructs an intricate narrative of mutual influence between science and the visual arts, gathering objects from Darwin’s own library, various British and American museums, and private collections.
The show’s current incarnation at the Yale Center was overseen by the curator Elisabeth Fairman, and it displays fossils, minerals and taxidermy from the extraordinary Peabody Museum at Yale. But the exhibition is primarily a creation of the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge, whose art collection Darwin savored as a student and recalled with affection as he gathered specimens on the long journey of the H.M.S. Beagle.
It is to the Fitzwilliam that the exhibition will travel in June. And like its illuminating catalog, edited by the show’s curators, Diana Donald, an art historian, and Jane Munro, from the Fitzwilliam, “Endless Forms” is a major achievement. The show also has a Web site: Darwinendlessformsorg.
The show’s impact comes from its shift in the focus of attention to the visual. From the very start, it demonstrates just how important it was for Darwin to learn to see. Some of his earliest inspirations were images of exploration that he came upon as a child and student, which are on display here. They include a book’s simple wood engravings of the snow-capped Andes Mountains that he said “first gave me a wish to travel in remote countries,” and an image of the Brazilian rain forest from 1828, which he later discovered was “exactly true” but which “underrates” the sublimity of the place.
The lust for exploration was accompanied by an almost fanatical attention to visual detail. There is an extraordinary poster-size image of the head of a flea created by Lens Aldous and used in an 1838 presentation at the Entomological Society of London, of which Darwin was vice president: a meticulous rendering of a magnified image. Darwin, almost alone among naturalists of his time, was not a gifted artist and could not have done anything comparable, but he might have compensated for that deficiency with obsessional precision. Minute differences between samples had to be carefully noted.
To the novitiate, two finches here from the Peabody collection that are from the Galapagos Islands might hardly merit a second glance. To Darwin’s eye they would have indicated subtle differentiation between species that he theorized evolved out of dissimilar environmental pressures.
The influence of these observations on the larger culture, though, was not in the small details but in the broadest canvas of ideas: the notion of geological rather than biblical time, the idea of transforming species rather than unchanging categories of creation, the ways in which finely wrought contrivances developed out of accident. Those are the themes of the show’s objects.
In later life, Darwin said that he regretted that his mind had become “a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts” and that this had led to the “lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes.” But this exhibition shows that he was too self-critical. It is an astonishing achievement to grind laws out of facts, particularly when so many disparate examples had to be gathered, and so many differences systematized.
Moreover, however efficient Darwin’s mental machinery became, he never lost his aesthetic taste: it seems to have inspired him. One of the problems that preoccupied him, in fact, is how the beautiful could arise out of natural accident. The notion that the male argus pheasant’s exotic feather designs could have evolved from the females’ selection of variations over time, he wrote, “seems as incredible, as that one of Raphael’s Madonnas should have been formed by the selection of chance daubs of paint made by a long succession of young artists, no one of whom intended at first to draw the human figure.”
Beauty was a recurring theme in his later work: if the beauty in nature that he found so palpable evolved out of the accidental and the arbitrary, why is beauty so often associated with just the opposite? (A Darwinian exploration of beauty can be found in Denis Dutton’s new book, “The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution.”)
Darwin referred to the “endless forms” that nature can produce without any pre-existing design: a vision that has turned out to be just as compelling for modernity as the notion of a preordained order was in earlier eras. But in this exhibition we find not the existential despair or cynicism we might expect following the dethroning of old beliefs, but an extravagant celebration of sense and sensation.
The excitement can be felt not only in the variegated colors of the feathers of birds of paradise gathered here on display, but also in the attempts to capture in paint the vibrancy, unpredictability and tragic grandeur of an untethered world.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment