Inspired by the Charles Darwin bicentennial, The Art of Evolution presents a collection of essays by international scholars renowned for their groundbreaking work on Darwin. The book not only includes a discussion of the popular imagery that immediately followed the publication of On the Origin of Species, but it also traces the impact of Darwin’s ideas on visual culture over time and throughout the Western world. The contributors analyze the visual expression of a broad range of Darwin-inspired subjects, including eugenics, aesthetics and sexual selection, monera and protoplasm theories, social Darwinism and colonialism, the Taylorized body, and the natural history of surrealism. The visual imagery responding to Darwin and Darwinism ranges from popular caricature to state propaganda to major trends within Modern Art and Modernism. This rarely addressed subject will enrich our understanding of Darwin’s impact across disciplines and reveal how transformations in science were manifested visually in so many enticingly unexpected ways. Contributors: Sara Barnes, Robert Michael Brain, Fae Brauer, Janet Browne, James Krasner, Barbara Larson, Marsha Morton, Gavin Parkinson, Andrew Patrizio, Phillip Prodger, Pat Simpson
Table of Contents
Preface • Introduction – Barbara Larson • Darwin in Caricature: A Study in the Popularization and Dissemination of Evolutionary Theory – Janet Browne • Ugly Disagreements: Darwin and Ruskin Discuss Sex and Beauty – Phillip Prodger • From Monera to Man: Ernst Haeckel, Darwinismus, and Nineteenth-Century German Art – Marsha Morton • Protoplasmania: Huxley, Haeckel, and the Vibratory Organism in Late Nineteenth-Century Science and Art – Robert Michael Brain • Framing Darwin: A Portrait of Eugenics – Fae Brauer • "One of a long row only": Sexual Selection and the Male Gaze in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D´Urbervilles – James Krasner • Darwin’s Sexual Selection and the Jealous Male in Fin-de-Siècle Art – Barbara Larson • Wild Beasts and Tame Primates: "Le Douanier" Rousseau’s Dream of Darwin’s Evolution – Fae Brauer • Imag(in)ing Post-Revolutionary Evolution: The Taylorized Proletarian, "Conditioning," and Soviet Darwinism in the 1920s – Pat Simpson • Emotional Fusion with the Animal Kingdom: Notes Toward a Natural History of Surrealism – Gavin Parkinson • Darwin on the Threshold of the Visible: Contemporary Art and Evolution – Sara Barnes and Andrew Patrizio • About the Contributors • Index