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Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science, and the Spiritual - Revised and Expanded Edition
How science changed the way artists understand reality
Exploring the Invisible shows how modern art expresses the first secular, scientific worldview in human history. Now fully revised and expanded, this richly illustrated book describes two hundred years of scientific discoveries that inspired French Impressionist painters and Art Nouveau architects, as well as Surrealists in Europe, Latin America, and Japan.
Lynn Gamwell describes how the microscope and telescope expanded the artist's vision into realms unseen by the naked eye. In the nineteenth century, a strange and exciting world came into focus, one of microorganisms in a drop of water and spiral nebulas in the night sky. The world is also filled with forces that are truly unobservable, known only indirectly by their effects--radio waves, X-rays, and sound-waves. Gamwell shows how artists developed the pivotal style of modernism--abstract, non-objective art--to symbolize these unseen worlds. Starting in Germany with Romanticism and ending with international contemporary art, she traces the development of the visual arts as an expression of the scientific worldview in which humankind is part of a natural web of dynamic forces without predetermined purpose or meaning. Gamwell reveals how artists give nature meaning by portraying it as mysterious, dangerous, or beautiful.
With a foreword by Neil deGrasse Tyson and a wealth of stunning images, this expanded edition of Exploring the Invisible draws on the latest scholarship to provide a global perspective on the scientists and artists who explore life on Earth, human consciousness, and the space-time universe.
Exploring the Invisible shows how modern art expresses the first secular, scientific worldview in human history. Now fully revised and expanded, this richly illustrated book describes two hundred years of scientific discoveries that inspired French Impressionist painters and Art Nouveau architects, as well as Surrealists in Europe, Latin America, and Japan.
Lynn Gamwell describes how the microscope and telescope expanded the artist's vision into realms unseen by the naked eye. In the nineteenth century, a strange and exciting world came into focus, one of microorganisms in a drop of water and spiral nebulas in the night sky. The world is also filled with forces that are truly unobservable, known only indirectly by their effects--radio waves, X-rays, and sound-waves. Gamwell shows how artists developed the pivotal style of modernism--abstract, non-objective art--to symbolize these unseen worlds. Starting in Germany with Romanticism and ending with international contemporary art, she traces the development of the visual arts as an expression of the scientific worldview in which humankind is part of a natural web of dynamic forces without predetermined purpose or meaning. Gamwell reveals how artists give nature meaning by portraying it as mysterious, dangerous, or beautiful.
With a foreword by Neil deGrasse Tyson and a wealth of stunning images, this expanded edition of Exploring the Invisible draws on the latest scholarship to provide a global perspective on the scientists and artists who explore life on Earth, human consciousness, and the space-time universe.
528 pages, Hardcover
First published September 30, 2002
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 9, 2012
Really lovely book on the slippery intersection between art, science, and the ineffable. Many illustrations, a fascinating and compelling history of art as seeing, and how changes in our ability to see and conceptualize changed our relationship with sublimity. An excellent book.
March 13, 2024
I took many lecture classes with Lynn and read this textbook cover to cover! Never enjoyed a textbook-like book in my life, but truly fell in love with Lynn’s writing and unique perspective on these cultural intersections. She speaks as passionately about her studies in person, as she writes them in this book. Highly recommend to anyone and everyone even if you don’t study art history as a primary subject, it truly has something to offer everyone.
March 17, 2020
What a beautiful book and I'm so honored to have a piece I created at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory included!
The book is both lush and scholarly. I wonderful way to spend time in the art/science world.
The book is both lush and scholarly. I wonderful way to spend time in the art/science world.
February 15, 2025
This book is as beautiful as it is enlightening. I’d also recommend Gamwell’s Mathematics and Art: A Cultural History.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews