#000004
Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science, and the Spiritual
Lynn Gamwell
Lynn Gamwell's big, gorgeously illustrated argument that modern art is the visual expression of the first secular, scientific worldview in human history. As the microscope and telescope opened worlds the naked eye cannot reach — microorganisms in a drop of water, spiral nebulae, and then the truly unobservable forces of radio waves and X-rays — artists reached for abstraction to picture the unpicturable. In this revised and expanded edition, with a foreword by Neil deGrasse Tyson, she traces that current from nineteenth-century Impressionism and Art Nouveau through Surrealism across Europe, Latin America, and Japan, and on to the present. It is a sweeping, accessible synthesis for anyone drawn to the seam where art, science, and the spiritual meet.
more…less ▴
The author
Lynn Gamwell (b. 1943) is an American historian of science and art who trained as an artist (an MFA from Claremont) before taking a PhD at UCLA. She was long the director of the art museum at SUNY Binghamton and now teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Her signature is interdisciplinary reach: she has curated exhibitions linking art to psychiatry, dreams, and cosmology — Dreams 1900–2000, The Sigmund Freud Antiquities, Madness in America — and written the companion volume Mathematics and Art: A Cultural History. An insider to both the gallery and the seminar room, which is why the book reads as neither art-world jargon nor pop science.
The book
First published in 2002; this Princeton edition (2020, 528 pages) substantially widens both the temporal and the geographical range — more contemporary art, and more of the world beyond Europe.
How it has aged
Well, as a richly visual work of synthesis. Its ambition — two centuries, many disciplines — is also its limit: specialists in any one area will find the treatment broad, and the through-line from science to abstraction is a strong thesis that flattens some countercurrents. But as a beautifully produced argument and a gateway, it has held up.
For more context
Gamwell's own Mathematics and Art; and the founding text on abstraction's spiritual roots, Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Lynn Gamwell
- Publisher
- Princeton
- Place of publication
- Princeton, New Jersey
- Year
- 2020
- Edition
- Revised and expanded edition
- ISBN
- 978-0-691-19105-8
- Format
- Hardcover
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Maine