ESSAYS ON ART AND SCIENCE

A neuroscientist investigates art.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2000, Kandel (b. 1929) brings his fascination with the intersection of art, psychology, and brain science to essays written over the last 10 years, many in conjunction with museum exhibitions. Throughout, he underscores the significance of the “beholder’s share,” or “the realization that art is incomplete without the perceptual and emotional involvement of the viewer.” Writing about Chaïm Soutine’s use of impasto, Kandel argues that “the use of strong tactile elements in a painting adds an important dimension to the beholder’s response” by translating visual sensation into tactile sensation. Kandel reprises and expands on themes he set forth in The Age of Insight, in which he examined the advent of modernism in Vienna in 1900, “a time and place in which Freud, Schnitzler, Mahler, Schoenberg, Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele, and many other notable artists and intellectuals lived and worked.” The intellectual and artistic ferment of the time led to theories of mind, including the unconscious, and sexuality that nourished the modernist project. In several essays, Kandel considers particular art forms from the perspective of brain science—e.g., portraiture, which requires the brain to form a representation of the face and body. Sculpture, while involving perception, “calls into play more powerful tactile and kinesthetic sensations than paintings do.” Especially challenging to the viewer is cubism “because it dares our visual system to reconstruct an image that is fundamentally different from the kinds of images our brain evolved to reconstruct.” Abstract art forces the viewer “to devise new ways of exploring the painting, to go beyond recognition and create new personal associations.” Artworks and scientific drawings illustrate Kandel’s penetrating examination of the complex processes that make up the eye of the beholder.

A lively, erudite inquiry into the experience of art.