Lynn Gamwell’s expensively produced, beautifully illustrated, and deeply flawed book traces the influence of science on art from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. It begins with a question—Where did abstract art come from?—and by way of an answer provides a statement that lays out the thesis of the book: “I propose that two catalysts contributed to the precipitation of abstract art: the scientific worldview that developed after the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection and the secular concepts of the spiritual that developed thereafter” (9).

Gamwell’s first catalyst, the adoption of the “scientific worldview,” provides her context: the challenge brought by science to traditional beliefs (most obviously evolution and Christianity) and the magnitude of its practical applications (from steam and trains to atoms and bombs) made science of vital interest to an educated public. The nineteenth-century explosion of print and illustration capitalized on this interest, making science both intelligible and popular. Gamwell deftly shows how this popularization varied by country and purpose: the Americans addressed their readers as potential contributors to science; the French saw theirs as a passive audience to be seduced by dramas of discovery and narratives of human struggle and triumph; the English had to overcome the negative association of science with technology that had brought about William Blake’s “dark satanic mills”; and the Germans presented the most difficult scientific material (for example, relativity) in a rational and accessible manner. In addition, Gamwell convincingly demonstrates that the educated Westerner gained a degree of familiarity with the events, substance, and vocabulary of scientific discovery and invention that would astonish us today.

Gamwell’s second catalyst, the “secular concepts of the spiritual” that developed after midcentury, is described as a product of German (and later Russian) attitudes toward nature. Heirs of Naturphilosophie, a romantic conception of a unified nature infused with consciousness, German scientists were amenable to hypothetical or theoretical views of nature, such as Darwinism, in their “pursuit of the absolute.” (page #). Their French counterparts, on the other hand, effectively rejected any hypothesis that could not be proved by experiment. Thus, abstract art in France begins with French artists favoring a close observation of nature as the basis of artistic inquiry and welcoming the results of experiments in vision, optics, and color theory. German and Russian abstraction, however, has its source in speculative concepts of the spiritual and even spiritualist beliefs such as theosophy.

Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science, and the Spiritual starts with the gains made in the physical and life sciences from midcentury and the effects of Naturphilosophie on German Romantic painting. These early chapters, the best in the book, attempt to explain how the differences between German and French science account for the differences in German and French abstraction. The middle section of the book concentrates on scientific explorations of the mind and brain, and the effects of research in the physiology of perception on Paul Cézanne and the Cubists. From there, Gamwell considers such topics as the effect of late-nineteenth-century advances in cell theory on the biomorphic forms of Jean Arp and Alexander Calder, the connections between Freudian psychology and Surrealism, and how Abstract Expressionism reflects the tragic view of human nature that was the result of discoveries in physics leading to the atomic bomb. In the concluding chapters, she suggests that the ironic or cynical art of Marcel Duchamp and his heirs was a reaction to the disunity of science in the late nineteenth century. She also shows how Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle inspired a cultural response to indeterminacy that forms “part of the landscape of postmodernism” (285). Finally, reverting to the metaphysical thread, the author describes how this cynical view is counteracted by the postmodern mysticism of Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer, who reinstate the spiritual overtones of cosmic unity first depicted in the work of Caspar David Friedrich.

Gamwell’s history of science is rich in detail but unfortunately misses some critical elements. She devotes pages to the theory of relativity, for example, but fails to show how it is predicated on the constancy of the speed of light. She describes the discovery of spectroscopy but mysteriously ignores Robert Bunsen, one of its essential pioneers. And she neglects to point out that spectroscopy depends both on the emission and the absorption of light, not just the latter. Such gaps flatten the real intellectual achievement of the discoveries and make the science seem a pedestrian enterprise.

The art, too, often becomes dull, a mere instrument of science. Symbolism is here seen as a response to advances in medicine (diagnoses of degeneration, studies of disease) or to the notion of entropy. James McNeill Whistler turned his back on abstract art because of his resistance to the “abstract invisible realms science was revealing” (155). Edgar Degas’s bathers and Edvard Munch’s sickrooms illustrate theories of hygiene and Louis Pasteur’s germ theory of disease. And although the scientific exploration of mental illness and neurosis suggests to Gamwell Vincent Van Gogh and Munch, neither artist incorporated those investigations into their art. (They didn’t illustrate nuttiness, they were nuts.)

Otherwise Gamwell has difficulty connecting the science to art except by approximation. Her language is couched in qualification, and she peppers her descriptions with “may haves” and “could haves.” For example, she has the Impressionists“intuiting the essence of [Hermann von Helmholtz’s] new understanding of vision” (66). And Van Gogh “may have been aware” of “illustrations explaining the colors of stars” (175) because they were common in science journalism. But Gamwell herself quotes a letter to his brother Theo where Vincent clearly states that Starry Night was painted from direct observation. Similarly, Duchamp “may have” been intrigued by pictures in the Paris popular-science press of time-lapse x-ray studies. Paul Klee “could have” known diagrams relating color and temperature of the stars when he painted Genesis of the Stars in 1913, or he “may have been inspired in the 1920s by popular reports about radiation in the atmosphere to create his haunting Horizon, Zenith and Atmosphere” (221). Oscar Dominigues’s Nostalgia of Space (1939) “suggest[s] the models of non-Euclidean volumes” (256), and Barnett Newman “may have noted Einstein’s long article, ‘Religion and Science,’ detailing cosmic religion in the 9 November 1930 [ … ] New York Times Magazine” (266). Other associations are even more tenuous: “Just as the parts of an Einstein formula refer to a theoretical reality that exists on in the scientist’s mind, the referent of an Abstract Expressionist painting exists only in the artist’s mind” (267). This is an interesting simile, but is there truly any direct connection between Einstein and Abstract Expressionism?

It is difficult to know for whom this book is intended. For art historians, the relationships between divisionism and color theory, Surrealism and Freud, theosophy and Wassily Kandinsky, physics and Duchamp have already been made, and made much clearer, by others. Even the putative link between Cubism and relativity reprised here has been dismantled before—Linda Henderson’s work in the field is the paradigm. What is left over is the influence of science on minor artists whose work is merely illustrative: mediocre paintings of cellular structures, for example, or of diagrams of stars.

And what art historian needs to be told on the one hand that “Otto von Bismarck declared a German empire in 1871” (93), yet on the other hand is expected to understand this sentence: [A parsec is] “an astronomical unit of length based on the distance from Earth at which stellar parallax equals one second of arc” (213)? The lack of didactic consistency is echoed in the notes: some claims are copiously footnoted, while others that are simply and baldly stated cry out for any kind of reference. And the editing infelicities: among the most egregious, public becomes a plural noun, and disinterest is used to mean lack of interest. Birth and death dates are provided for most (but not all) artists, but not for scientists. Each illustrated painting, drawing, print, or sculpture is provided with its source and dimensions, yet only a few photographs merit this treatment. Although Gamwell reproduces the well-known illustration by Gustave Rejlander for Darwin’s Expression of the Emotion in Men and Animals and Arthur Worthington’s high-speed photographs of a falling drop of milk, she fails to mention their creators’ names.

But then Gamwell is curiously negligent about photography overall. Although I would think the medium would merit her attention, given its claims as both an art and a science, her sporadic attempts to consider photography are undermined by mistakes. She states that James Clerk Maxwell projected a color photograph to the British Academy of Science when in fact he showed partly drawn and partly photographically produced diapositives at the Royal Institution. She moves the French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey’s 1883 invention of chronophotography to 1888. She credits Darwin with an 1872 series of experiments in which he correlated human emotion and facial expression. The experiments were originally carried out—and photographed—by the neurologist Duchenne de Boulogne more than a decade earlier. She has Jean-Martin Charcot establishing a laboratory for time-lapse photography of hysterical behavior and grand mal seizures at the Salpêtrière hospital in 1883, with the results published in the Iconographic Journal of the Salpêtrière. In fact, the photo lab was founded by the photographer Albert Londe; it was established for medicine in general, not time-lapse photography. There was only one series taken of a (male) hysteric and none of grand mal seizures, and neither that series nor any other photograph was ever published in Iconographic Journal of the Salpêtrière after 1883.

More troubling than all of these factual errors is Gamwell’s missed opportunity. She seems unaware that the invisible worlds hypothesized by science were most often made visible by photography, from the x-ray to the movement of particles in a cloud chamber. The popularization of science—essentially, making science visible—depended on photography to illustrate its observations and experiments even before the images could be reproduced in books. This is the crucial link between science and art that is left unexplored. The odd junction of science, the occult, and photography that was another particularly fecund source for artists at the beginning of the twentieth century is similarly overlooked. In short, Exploring the Invisible starts with one question—Where did abstract art come from?—but it ends by raising many more.