Almost 50 years after CP Snows famous Two Cultures lecture, are art and science still worlds apart?
In 1969, Conrad Waddington, professor of animal genetics at the University of Edinburgh, published a seminal study of the relation between painting and science (Behind Appearance, EUP). He argued that science is no Cyclops, looking out at the world from a single eye, but is instead more like an Argus, with a hundred eyes. There is as much diversity to be found in science as in art, he argued, so any account of their relationship is far from straightforward. Waddington’s story began with the influence of Einstein’s relativity theory on the cubists. He continues by examining the view held by futurists and constructivists, that science and technology were a force that would sweep away the constraints of tradition, revolutionising art and society. Around the same time, expressionists and surrealists were adopting a very different attitude to science and technology, opposing the rationalism of science to the irrationalism of art. They saw in art a gateway to the mythic and the subconscious.
