The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present

  • Eric Kandel
Random House: 2012. 656 pp. $40, £25.04 9781400068715 | ISBN: 978-1-4000-6871-5

This is a big book — in size, scope and ambition. Eric Kandel sets out to explore the effect of art not just on the human mind but, in the true spirit of the twenty-first century, on the machinery of the brain itself: the neural mechanisms that give us the phenomena that we describe as feeling and self-awareness. Who better as a guide to this science than Kandel, who won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the physiological basis of memory?

To bring this vast project into the compass of a single book, Kandel confines his analysis to his native city — the Vienna that he was forced to flee with his family as a child just before the Second World War. (The city has since made overtures to attract him back, if only as an honoured visitor.)

Credit: MARTIN O'NEILL

Kandel has further tilted the playing field in his own favour because, although The Age of Insight bills itself as a Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, it is really an attempt to analyse the psychological effects of figurative art, particularly portraiture. Abstract art gets little or no mention. You may come away from The Age of Insight with some idea of why you are moved by the paintings of, say, Lucian Freud; but you will learn little about why you are gripped by a Jackson Pollock.

Nevertheless, this is an impressive work. Kandel considers Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka — three of the great artists of the modern era, at work in Vienna at the start of the twentieth century, when Sigmund Freud was undertaking his revolutionary investigation of the unconscious. Kandel makes of the artists a springboard for a comprehensive review of the neurobiology behind perception and art appreciation.

Noting the “remarkable similarity between [Sigmund] Freud's ability to use language to probe the unconscious and the ability of the modernist painters to depict it”, Kandel moves from Klimt's highly decorative and often overwrought portraits of society women to the weightier aspects of his art. These resonate with Freud's work — from erotic drawings to memento mori. Here we have the twin pillars of Freudian theory: Eros, the life force, and Thanatos, the death drive.

From Klimt it is a natural step to the art of his protégé Schiele, a wayward genius in the true twentieth-century mould, in whose work Kandel finds “a pictorial version of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams”. The third of the trio, the expressionist Kokoschka, is perhaps more interesting because he is less obvious. What concerns Kandel is how this artist conveys, and the audience reads, emotion in the human face. Kandel explores what the observer brings to the feast — the “beholder's share” achieved through top-down processing that depends on memory and experience — and how innate processes in the brain filter incoming information from the “bottom up”. He suggests how artists may unconsciously exploit these brain functions, for example by using colour to convey emotions in portraiture.

Throughout, Kandel combines a professional knowledge of brain scans with a firm grasp of the ideas of another Viennese exile, the art historian Ernst Gombrich, whose seminal 1960 work Art and Illusion examined the mechanics of the artistic response. One might say that Kandel has taken up Gombrich's torch, moving from the psychology of perception to the actual mechanics of it.

Kandel understands, and explains, how the observer brings a lifetime of experience to the simple act of looking at a painting; how “mirror neurons” elicit empathy in the brain; how “we are not only inspired and seduced by art, but also mystified, startled, frightened, and even repulsed by it”. And he knows where, in the brain's 1.5 kilograms of fat and water, all these responses are located. It is quite a ride, and a beautifully scenic one with extensive, excellent and apposite illustrations.

Some of his arguments might be seen as contentious. Can our ideal of beauty really be hard-wired so that it has “varied surprisingly little from century to century or one culture to another”? (Has Kandel compared a seventeenth-century Rubens nude with 1960s Twiggy?) And is there really an adaptive advantage in our appreciation of art, or is it nothing more than a quirky by-product of a complex, self-conscious mind? But by and large, you go along with Kandel, because he simply knows so much.

Yet he would be the first to agree that this area of neuroscience is in its infancy. Marrying the sciences and humanities is a worthwhile undertaking, but Kandel admits what any serious observer of art will feel — that even when you have explained every neuron, every synapse, every glimmer in the amygdala or flicker in the prefrontal cortex, you still won't have explained what it is actually like to stand in front of a Klimt or Kokoschka and feel the thrill. That is to do with consciousness, or what Kandel calls introspective experience: “a phenomenon not readily accessible to objective scientific enquiry”. I suspect that, even with the best neurobiology in the world, we will never be able to understand that.