Art and Science in 1998

What has emerged in this series, despite the core of commonalities linking old masters, classic modernists and living artists, is a clear change in shape for the relationships between art and science across the three areas.

Some readers were bemused, and others amused, to find a series of images by Cornelia Parker in the pages of Nature last autumn. Her work invites us to let our imaginations run free.

Cornelia Hesse-Honegger is fascinated by the beauty of bugs. After the Chernobyl disaster she set out with her paintbox on the trail of mutated insects, convinced that they were the result of radiation poisoning.

Painting ‘portraits’ of churches might seem a limiting pursuit. But the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Pieter Saenredam turned it into a paean of praise for the geometrical way in which we perceive space.

Mario Merz seeks to take art beyond the aesthetic and into the realms of experimentation. A favourite subject of his has been the mathematics of growing populations.

Turner is famous as a master of the use of primary colours to depict light in painting. What is less well known is that he was also a student of the science behind that art.

Scientists have always had an irresistible urge to list and classify. But the work of the artist Herman de Vries reminds us that nature's variety will always defy our attempts at imposing a fixed order.

Max Ernst delved into his childhood experiences to find images for his art that would both explore Freudian psychology and mock those who put unquestioning faith in scientific rationality.

Jan Vermeer's mastery of the use of paint was such that we see more in his pictures than is actually there. The painter achieved his illusions by using the picture as a field for perceptual exploration.

William Latham is working to establish a place for computers in the world of art. He sets the design rules to be followed and his program generates images in a process that could be called a simulation of evolution in action.

Viewpoints revolve in space and are transformed in time in the art of Umberto Boccioni, a member of the Futurists, who embraced the new sciences and technologies of their age. Boccioni aimed to express a series of relativities.

A volcanic eruption was a fitting subject for Joseph Wright. The artist had links with some of the great scientific thinkers in an age when science was beginning to discover the secrets of the forces that shape the Earth.

Crystals forming on a sea of brine in one of Glen Onwin's installations demonstrated the emergence of shape from chaos — and reflected the artist's interest in the origins of matter.

Berenice Abbott was fascinated by the challenge of capturing on film motion too rapid for the human eye. Her scientific photography has given a new meaning to the term‘portraiture’.

The faces of the four apostles in Dürer's painting speak volumes about the saints' temperaments. This is no accident, as the artist was following the Renaissance medical theory of the four humours.

Andy Goldsworthy sets out to explore some of the recurring forms in the world around us, using a variety of media drawn from nature itself — snow and sand, twigs and thorns.

Turner delights his audiences with his magical depictions of nature on canvas. James Turrell is using nature itself as the canvas — by digging into a volcanic crater to create a new kind of observatory.

Salvador Dali's image of the crucified Christ represents the search for the transcendental or fourth dimension. Artists, theologians, mathematicians and cosmologists down the ages have all joined in the quest.