The Artist and the Atom^ 



By Peter Blanc 



Art Department, American University 



[With 5 plates] 



It is a commonplace of contemporary thought that the period of 

 the last hundred years has been preeminently an age of science. All 

 fields of intellectual endeavor exhibit signs of the infiltration and 

 influence of the scientific attitude, and all display scars, indeed open 

 and still bleeding wounds, inflicted by the penetration of the new 

 and shocking discoveries, theories, and conceptions of modern science. 

 The plastic arts have been no exception, and critics and art historians 

 are at one in perceiving a connection between science and modern 

 art from the impressionists to date. But the particular aspects of 

 scientific thought which appear in modern painting and sculpture 

 have not been analyzed. It is the purpose of this article to establish 

 that the connection between modern science and modern art lies pre- 

 dominantly in that field of scientific thought which is the most dis- 

 turbing, and by the same token the most enlightening, to the philo- 

 sophical thinker : the field of research into the basic composition of the 

 universe and all that it contains — ^the theory of atomic matter. 



In the early years of the nineteenth century the scientific center of 

 the world was Paris. In France during the eighteenth century science 

 had permeated literature— Fontenelle, Voltaire, Buff on— and this con- 

 nection between science and literature was maintained during the early 

 nineteenth century largely owing to the constitution of the Academic 

 des Sciences as part of the Institut. In Germany, on the other hand, 

 science was merely the handmaiden of philosophy, and science courses 

 at the universities were taught on the basis of doubtful philosophic 

 theories. The situation in Germany was more typical of the period 

 than was that in France, for on the whole the scientists were then 

 working in obscurity in the laboratory, conducting experiments and 

 accumulating the mass of data which in the main was not to be synthe- 

 sized into general principles and disclosed to the public till the last 

 half of the century. 



1 Reprinted by permission from Magazine of Art, vol. 44, No. 4, April 1951. Copyright by 

 tlie Amt'rican Federation of Arts. 



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