By Amy Ione
Abstract:
Recently art historians (e.g. Crary and Nichel) have proposed that the traditional linear narrative of modernist art might be restated by showing nineteenth century art and science were overlapping components of a single social structure that transformed all disciplines. Expanding upon the idea that changes were more complex than a linear trajectory conveys, this paper critically analyzes key innovations. The resulting analysis in turn demonstrates that interweaving disciplinary changes related to optics, seeing, and vision offer a viable means to reconfigure the linear trajectory traditionally used in art history presentations (Classical art > Impressionism/Cézanne > Cubism/the twentieth century break with Renaissance realistic structures). As will be illustrated, and perhaps of greater importance, engaging with disciplinary revisions as they impacted Western culture on the whole enhances our understanding of the century.
Drawing upon the work and writings of those now considered to be key contributors to ideas about vision and the nineteenth century vision of the world (Brewster, Wheatstone, von Helmholtz, Baudelaire, Cézanne, Watkins, etc.), the discussion will document how interdisciplinary communication brought some measure of cohesion to the changing culture matrix of the nineteenth century. Particular attention will be given to (1) the primary sources of the nineteenth century that show there was exchange between scientists and non-scientists, (2) how the modernization of subjectivity can be correlated with philosophical revisions as well as the technological expansion that was most evident in the visual and scientific domains, (3) the changing relationship between images and narratives in art and literature, (4) how nineteenth century innovations in science (the invention of the stereoscope, the scientific understanding of binocular vision, the Young-Helmholtz theory) and innovative visual technologies that were developed across disciplines (e.g., photography) were integrated, and (5) how scientific information meshed with tacit understandings, perceptions, and beliefs.
Author: Amy Ione, PO Box 12748, Berkeley, CA 94712 [email: ione@Lmi.net / URL: http://users.Lmi.net/ione]
Presented at “Ways of
Seeing: The Nineteenth Century.”
Conference sponsored by INCS (Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies). The University of Paris-X, Nanterre, Nanterre, France. June 22-24, 2000