438 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1951 



of cloud-chamber collisions are to be found in many modern physics 

 textbooks. The dramatic quality of these investigations has caught 

 the public interest, and only a few months ago the discovery of still 

 another type of subatomic "particle" was publicized by Life magazine 

 in an article that included numerous large-scale reproductions of 

 cloud-chamber photogi'aphs. Under the circumstances, there is a 

 reasonable presumption that some of the artists mentioned above were 

 already familiar with the effects observable in the cloud-chamber when 

 they began painting in this manner. 



Again, it is not suggested that the paintings are a deliberate imita- 

 tion of the photographs. On the contrary, they are by and large even 

 more intricate and are freighted with a burden of human emotion 

 totally lacking in the cloud-chamber views. But the surface simi- 

 larity is far too great to be lightly dismissed, and the emotional im- 

 plications in these paintings of the human mind groping for some 

 state of equilibrium and order in a mysterious, strange, and insub- 

 stantial universe is too obviously analogous to the state of modern 

 science to be dismissed. It is not too much to assume that an intuitive 

 perception of the analogy between the efforts of the scientist on the 

 physical plane to find order in his shattered world, and the perennial 

 effort of the artist to find the spiritual order and unity which charac- 

 terize the work of art, has led the artist to subconscious exploitation 

 of remembered impressions of cloud-chamber photographs as the 

 common symbol of this search. 



Thus it appears that during the past hundred years the majority 

 of the important innovations in the plastic arts have occurred simul- 

 taneously with, or shortly after, revolutionary changes in man's con- 

 cept of the constitution of matter. In some cases the artists them- 

 selves have admitted that the new theories established by the scientists 

 contributed to their development; others have denied any such con- 

 scious influence. But the chronological parallelism and the mutuality 

 of concept and image form overwhelming evidence of the closeness 

 of the relationship. "Whether science influenced art or art influenced 

 science makes very little difference; for in neither case was the in- 

 fluence accepted in slavish fashion. The scientist has not become an 

 artist nor the artist a scientist. They simply share a mutual pre- 

 occupation — today, a mutual problem ; and each approaches it in his 

 habitual way and from his habitual point of view. The facts suggest 

 that science was first to establish the new truths about the universe 

 which were then taken into consideration by the artists. But it is 

 well to remember that the scientists of each decade built upon the facts 

 elaborated by their predecessors. In this sense the influences that led 

 Rutherford to his famous conclusions were identical with the influ- 

 ences that led the cubists to develop their new expressions of reality. 



