NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. In his essay C. P. Snow focused specifically on humanist scholars who were literary intellectuals. But the essay applies to all the humanists and has generally been interpreted more broadly (see for examples Wilson 1977, Ramachandran 2011).
2. The term Abstract Expressionism actually has a long history. It was first used in 1919 by the German magazine Der Sturm to describe German Expressionism. In 1929 Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art, applied the term to the work of Wassily Kandinsky. It was first applied to the New York School in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates.
C. P. Snow followed up his original Rede Lecture of 1959 on The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution with The Two Cultures: A Second Look, published in 1963. In this second book Snow introduced the idea, which I emphasize here, that there can be mediating third cultures. The notion of third cultures was elaborated upon by John Brockman in The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (1995).
In my book on figurative art and science, The Age of Insight (2013), I discuss the two cultures in the following terms:
In the decades since Snow’s lecture, the gulf separating the two cultures has begun to narrow. Several things have contributed to that narrowing. The first was Snow’s coda to the second edition of his book The Two Cultures: A Second Look, published in 1963. In it, he discusses the extensive response to his lecture and describes the possibility of a third culture that could mediate a dialogue between scientists and humanists:
With good fortune, however, we can educate a large proportion of our better minds so that they are not ignorant of imaginative experience, both in the arts and in science, nor ignorant either of the endowments of applied science, of the remediable suffering of most of their fellow humans, and of the responsibilities which, once they are seen, cannot be denied.
Thirty years later, John Brockman advanced Snow’s idea in his essay “The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution.” Brockman emphasized that the most effective way of bridging the divide would be to encourage scientists to write for the general public in a language that an educated reader can readily understand. This effort is currently under way in print, on radio and television, on the Internet, and in other media: good science is being successfully communicated to a general audience by the very scientists who created it (Kandel 2013, 502). For a discussion of reductionism in biology, see:
Crick, Francis. 1966. Of Molecules and Men. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Squire, L. and E. R. Kandel. 2008. Memory: From Mind to Molecules. 2nd ed. Englewood, Colo.: Roberts and Co.
1. THE EMERGENCE OF A REDUCTIONIST SCHOOL OF ABSTRACT ART IN NEW YORK
For a discussion of the New York School and the movement of the center of art from Paris to New York, see:
Greenberg, C. 1955. “American Type Painting.” Partisan Review 22: 179–196. Reprinted in Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1961, 208–229).
Rosenberg, Harold. 1952. “The American Action Painters.” Art News (December).
Schapiro, M. 1994. Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society. New York: George Braziller.
2. THE BEGINNING OF A SCIENTIFIC APPROACH TO ART
Kandel, E. R. 2012. The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain from Vienna 1900 to the Present. New York: Random House.
Riegl, A. 2000. The Group Portraiture of Holland. Trans. E. M. Kain and D. Britt. 1902; reprint, Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities.
3. THE BIOLOGY OF THE BEHOLDER’S SHARE: VISUAL PERCEPTION AND BOTTOM-UP PROCESSING IN ART
Albright, T. 2015. “Perceiving.” Daedalus (winter 2015): 22–41.
Freiwald, W. A., and D. Y. Tsao. 2010. “Functional Compartmentalization and Viewpoint Generalization Within the Macaque Face-Processing System.” Science 330:845–851.
Gilbert, C. 2013. “Top-Down Influences on Visual Processing.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 14: 350–363.
Zeki, S. 1999. Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
4. THE BIOLOGY OF LEARNING AND MEMORY: TOP-DOWN PROCESSING IN ART
Kandel, E. R. 2006. In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind. New York: Norton.
Kandel, E. R., Y. Dudai, and M. R. Mayford, eds. 2016. Learning and Memory. Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press.
5. REDUCTIONISM IN THE EMERGENCE OF ABSTRACT ART
Gooding, M. 2000. Abstract Art. London: Tate Gallery.
6. MONDRIAN AND THE RADICAL REDUCTION OF THE FIGURATIVE IMAGE
Lipsey, R. 1988. An Art of Our Own: The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art. Boston and Shaftesbury: Shambhala.
Spies, W. 2010. Path to the Twentieth Century: Collected Writings on Art and Literature. New York: Abrams.
Zeki, S. 1999. Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, chapter 12.
7. THE NEW YORK SCHOOL OF PAINTERS
Naifeh, S. and G. Smith. 1989. Jackson Pollock: An American Saga. New York: Potter.
Stevens, M. and A. Swan. 2005. De Kooning: An American Master. New York: Random House.
8. HOW THE BRAIN PROCESSES AND PERCEIVES ABSTRACT IMAGES
Albright, T. 2015. “Perceiving.” Daedalus (winter 2015): 22–41.
9. FROM FIGURATION TO COLOR ABSTRACTION
Breslin, J.E.B. 1993. Mark Rothko: A Biography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Princenthal, N. 2015. Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art. New York: Thames & Hudson.
10. COLOR AND THE BRAIN
Zeki, S. 2008. Splendors and Miseries of the Brain: Love, Creativity, and the Quest for Human Happiness. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley-Blackwell.
11. A FOCUS ON LIGHT
Miller, D., ed. 2015. Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection. New York: Whitney Museum.
Spies, W. 2011. The Eye and the World: Collected writings on Art and Literature. Vol. 8: Between Action Painting and Pop Art. New York: Abrams.
12. A REDUCTIONIST INFLUENCE ON FIGURATION
Fortune, B. B., W. W. Reaves, and D. C. Ward. 2014. Face Value: Portraiture in the Age of Abstraction. Washington, D.C.: GILES in association with the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
13. WHY IS REDUCTIONISM SUCCESSFUL IN ART?
Gombrich, E. H. 1982. The Image and the Eye: Further Studies in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. London: Phaidon.
14. A RETURN TO THE TWO CULTURES
Kandel, E. R. 1979. “Psychotherapy and the Single Synapse: The Impact of Psychiatric Thought on Neurobiologic Research.” New England Journal of Medicine 301:1028–1037.
Wilson, E. O. 1977. “Biology and the Social Sciences.” Daedalus 2:127–140.