Thought So

Figures

Figure 1: Luis Felipe Noé, La estática velocidad, one of the works representing Argentina at the Venice Biennale, 2009. Photograph courtesy of Celina Chatruc.

Figure 2: Boris Anrep, The Awakening of the Muses (1933). In this photograph from the Public Domain, Virginia Woolf lounges at 9 oʼclock with a cocked elbow.

Figure 3: Astronomical observatory tower of Claro Cornelio Dassen’s residence in 2024, viewed from the rear. Photograph courtesy of Ailin Sigal.

Figure 4: New Yorker cover art. Horizon Index of landscapes.

Figure 5: American Physical Society Normalized Word Counts: Enigma, Revolution, Cosmos, Completely Revise.

Figure 6: American Physical Society Normalized Word Counts: Extraordinary, Mystery, Disagree.

Figure 7: American Physical Society Normalized Word Counts: Agree, New Concept.

Figure 8: American Physical Society Normalized Word Counts: Remarkable.

Tables

Table 1: Hayden White’s rhetorical modes for historians

Table 2: The Horizon Index for Edvard Munch is more consistently modernist than for Pablo Picasso

Table 3: New Yorker cover art. Horizon Index of landscapes

Preface

The following pages are about European-inspired art and science over the past century and a half. They treat pictures, in David Hockney’s sense, and words used by scientists and mathematicians.¹ The North Atlantic World knows the time as High Modernity, from 1860 to 1990, and Postmodernity, from 1990 to 2020. I look into two intellectual endeavors together, easel-painting and physics. I want to use this material the better to understand past feelings and sensibilities, to use an older term. I believe that the past is more than indiscriminate wreckage, clearing for brief moments to allow for the prosecution of art and science. Past culture, to which art and science belong, has a shape that is important for us to know as we look to the near future.

I am particularly interested in understanding past styles in art and science. I argue that art is usefully seen as part of technology, a human activity distinct from both the humanities and the natural sciences. From this point of view, art and science are complementary creative enterprises: The beholder’s share in art complements the independent verification of a new scientific result. I contend that analyzing art and science together is almost required for delineating style, which, despite sustaining several generations of adverse questioning, remains a robust popular notion. Style radiates from period-rooms at museums and undergraduate course-catalogs. It provides a living for connoisseurs. Where would cuisine, coiffure, and couture be without it?

Explanations about why distinct personal styles persist or perish proceed by thick description that conflates the idiosyncrasy of biography, on the one hand, with large-scale social patterns, on the other hand. But confecting a story from bits and pieces of the past can be misleading: When addressing early modern Europe, we are accustomed to emphasize the importance of commerce at the expense of sodality, and when examining High Modernity, we usually focus on mechanism and materialism at the expense of idealism and spirituality. Here I examine how intellectual historians have addressed this question, and I offer directions for identifying cultural motifs in the past.

Historians have traditionally bridged the gap between the particular and the general by contextualizing their sources. They say that the sources are not mere idiosyncratic one-offs; rather, the sources represent something broader. In the absence of making such a case, the work tends to be dismissed as an insignificant curiosity. Frank Manuel, Newton’s psychological biographer, emphasized more than 50 years ago: “The histories of fashion, clothes, sexual and marital customs, punishments, style, and a hundred other questions which have traditionally belonged to la petite histoire and to the antiquarians need to be explored for their symbolic content.”² Manuel used the word petite in its sense of insignificance. It is a sense shared by literature Nobelist Hermann Hesse when, in his novel The Glass Bead Game (1943), he described the intellectual climate of the twentieth century as the Age of the Feuilleton (meaning light literary entertainment), a time of intellectual frivolity. Because Hesse’s novel is on one level a satire of modern intellectuals, I think that he would agree that serious historians pay attention to engaging the reader without pandering. Over the past several generations, talented writers taking up Manuel’s challenge have gone beyond chronicling gossip and trifle in the past. I am mindful of their accomplishments in the following pages.

The book has three chapters, each with a special focus: 1) affirming that historians of art and science are most effective when they formulate their own protocols to address the documents and artifacts they see; 2) using social history of art and science in an overlooked setting to present a new picture of Modernity; and 3) inquiring into a new stylistic turn in art and science by interrogating large data sets in the recent past.

The first chapter deals with style in past ages—general sensibilities that guide thought and action. The advantages and the drawbacks of schemes offered by major theorists of the past several generations are used to support the proposition that practicing historians do best when they create their own methods. I examine the views of literary historian Hayden White, artist Luis Felipe Noé, social historian Erich Kahler, cultural historian José Ortega y Gasset, historiographer Reinhart Koselleck, and historians of science Thomas Kuhn and Paul Forman.

Viewing art as artifice, or technology, underscores the creation of the European fine-arts gilds and diverse academies in Early Modernity. It associates the social practices of the art community with technology, rather than with science. The separation of science from technology may be found in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Over the past several centuries, moderns took the separation to mean that technology is know-how, while science (and by extension scholarship generally) seeks to know why. Furthermore, while art and technology display their products in the agora, the products of science appear in words and numbers for specialist onlookers. Taking art as part of technology emphasizes that art is a domain at right angles to science, rather than compatible with it.³ In my book The Shock of Recognition (2021), this understanding is behind what I call Historical Complementarity, a method for identifying leading themes or motifs in the past. There I introduced art and science in Argentina, a compact and complex intellectual setting. The present second chapter extends the discussion by proposing a new model for Modernity in parts of the globe that helps account for the reception of Cubism and Relativity by emphasizing counterdisciplinary commitments among artists and mathematicians. In particular, I examine the publications, teaching, and sensibilities of two early twentieth-century artist-mathematicians in greater Buenos Aires, Claro Cornelio Dassen and Emilio Coutaret.

The third chapter examines how the notion of art as a technological counterpoint to science may help us see more clearly into the near future of intellectual life. I introduce Johan Huizinga’s metaphor of over-ripeness in the culture of late-medieval Burgundy and France to invigorate the art-historical notion of mannerism. Using Historical Complementarity, I interrogate large data in art and physics together for themes and feelings over the recent past which prepare us for tomorrow’s intellectual weather. In particular, I study the cover art of the New Yorker magazine and the publications of the American Physical Society over the past 70 years. Huizinga believed that the main task of a historian is to focus on points of contact between historical periods.⁴ I offer quantitative evidence for a crisis in our understanding of the world and perhaps for an emerging age characterized by integrative motifs.

Ideas in the following pages have been my companions for much of the past half century.⁵ Their consideration assumes special urgency today, when the integrity of ideas—even their very humanity—faces grave challenges. I hope that younger people find their way here. When the light of reason grows dim, as can happen, a reappraisal of the past offers consolation and guidance, helping us understand both the continuity and the novelty of what appears before our eyes.

Just as there are themes in common between the evolution of large marine mammals and small social insects, so also between an author’s longer and shorter books. My most recent book was long. Commending the following pages is their brevity. Working on his generations-long project to survey science in Chinese civilization, biochemist and historian Joseph Needham kept in mind an Arabic saying: The dogs bark, the caravan moves on.⁶ I hear the baying. On the road ahead, I want to keep the past in focus to join Robert Browning’s “adventure brave and new.”

South Windsor, Connecticut

December 2024