Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts is an ambitious exhibition exploring the relationship between Charles Darwin’s theories and the art of 19th-century Europe. The 19th century was one of discovery, invention, and the emerging concept that man finally had the tools to master his environment and thereby conquer nature. The exhibition, organized by the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge in association with the Yale Center for British Art, not only introduces visitors to the artwork but also the societal zeitgeist during the dawn of Darwinism.
Approaching the exhibit, one first sees two bronze sculptures standing in counterpoint to one another. On the left, Emmanuel Fremiet’s hulking gorilla is kidnapping a woman; on the right, Hugo Rheinhold’s ape sits atop a stack of books — including the Bible and a book conspicuously labeled “Darwin” — calipers in toe and skull in hand. Deep in thought, the ape’s posture immediately recalls Rodin’s The Thinker. These two sculptures represent two competing ideologies of Darwin’s age. Africa was still unexplored, and primates were being studied for the first time. King Kong came into being in the popular imagination at the same time Darwin was proposing that primates are our closest living relatives. Fremiet’s work plays on the popular image of a bestial primate threatening a virgin woman who is in need of rescue. In direct contrast, Rheinhold casts his ape in an anthropomorphic light. This salient juxtaposition sets the tone for the exhibit and reflects the controversy Darwin’s theories would create, while explicating the pre-existing cultural context into which they emerged.
Befitting a show of Endless Forms, the exhibit contains a wide spectrum of art and a dizzying array of stuffed specimens — including a case housing 35 hummingbirds — and geological artifacts and fossils (the latter largely culled from Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History). Curators Diana Donald and Jane Munro chose to embrace a thematic framework, dividing the exhibit into a series of vignettes, roughly aligned chronologically. For instance, the opening section, “Darwin’s Eye,” offers a stunning look at the art that Darwin the naturalist would have been exposed to and even includes a rare stratigraphical map penned by Darwin himself (unfortunately, he was not a gifted artist). Another segment is devoted to “The Struggle for Existence,” both in the wild and as applied to society, including the ideas of Thomas Malthus.
The area entitled “Dynamic Earth” explores artists’ use, and sometimes response to, geologic discoveries of the time. Featured are a number of exemplary paintings by members of the Romanticist and Hudson River schools. Paintings by John Ruskin, Alfred William Hunt, and John Brett depict the geological processes that helped shape the earth. Some work, such as Thomas Cole’s 1829 Subsiding Waters of the Deluge, acknowledged that geological processes occur, yet by including Noah’s ark, still ascribed to a Biblical timeline for the age of the earth.
A highlight of the exhibit is a collection of objects used or possessed by Darwin during his lifetime. One particular case displays a Wedgwood dinner plate decorated with an ornate water lily next to a botanical illustration of the same flower. Darwin’s parents owned the plate, and it’s easy to imagine a young Charles, avoiding eating his peas, enthralled with the image before his eyes. Also in the same display case rests the very copy of Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours that Darwin used during his voyage on the H.M.S. Beagle. The guidebook was used at the time by scientists to standardize color, thereby making various observations comparable. Here it is opened to a page devoted to shades of blue, and immediately adjacent are a slew of mineral specimens, with their corresponding Syme color numbers. The placement of these singular objects raises fundamental questions about the modes art and science use to represent reality.
While the thematic organizational scheme of the exhibit allowed breadth, it at times broke down. Sections were not necessarily self-contained, and many objects could have been placed in numerous areas. This tangling of themes is not surprising (especially for those familiar with modern synthesis), but it is also left unaddressed; the result is an often disjointed experience, in which the curators, in perhaps a Malthusian moment, rely on the viewers to make these connections for themselves.
Importantly, the curators did an excellent job of tying pieces of the show, such as a beautiful illustration of a finch set beside two modern-day stuffed finches, to present- day life. John Gould, an ornithologist and friend of Darwin, was the first to observe that the finches Darwin brought back from his voyage on the Beagle had differently shaped beaks. Darwin would later hypothesize that these different beak shapes came about through evolutionary pressures. By including modern-day finches, each with a uniquely shaped beak, the curators remind visitors that evolution continues to this day and affects our world.
Given the sweeping implications of Darwin’s theory — after all, by definition virtually anything can be tied to evolution — it is sometimes difficult to know where relevancy ends and begins. This is no more apparent than in the concluding section, “Darwin and the Impressionists.” These last wall spaces no doubt contain the most famous works of art in the entire exhibit, including one of Monet’s paintings of the Rouen Cathedral. The curators explain: “Monet treats the erosion of the masonry and sculpture with the same attention to quasi-geological detail he does when painting natural forms … In this way he transforms a potent symbol of Christianity into a subject for scientific inquiry.” It seems more likely that a Rouen painting was selected simply due to Georges Clemenceau’s comment that they were “ordered, classified, and completed in an achieved evolution” (author’s emphasis). Here the connection to Darwin is tangential at best, and there is a danger that this specific perspective will mislead those unfamiliar with the accepted interpretations of these impressionist works.
While evolutionary theory is unlikely to become a subspecialty of any impressionist scholar, the exhibit as a whole is a conceptually daring investigation of how society, through art, reacted to one of science’s greatest achievements. Perhaps more powerfully, Endless Forms offers a unique look at the art world that surrounded and engendered Darwin and forces viewers to re-evaluate preconceived notions about what C.P. Snow famously described as the “two cultures.” The arts and sciences, as well as the past and present, are represented in an admirably holistic fashion. Indeed, as Darwin wrote in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
Figure 1.
A case of stuffed hummingbirds, with species in the genus Agyrtria by John Gould featured in the Endless Forms exhibit at the Yale British Art Center and the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge. Courtesy of the Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London
Figure 2.
Plate with brown water lily pattern from a dinner service designed and manufactured by Wedgwood & Byerley at Etruria, Staffordshire, ca. 1807, earthenware printed underglaze in brown, painted overglaze in pale terracotta enamel and gilt. Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge
Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts, as reviewed, ended May 3, 2009, at the Yale Center for British Art. The exhibit continues at the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge from June 16 to October 4, 2009.