Bradley's sculpture embodies the mathematical structure of nature and the beauty of pure mathematics.Lynn Gamwell

Color and Form: The Geometric Sculptures of Morton C. Bradley, Jr.

Arts & Photography

GAMWELL, Lynn

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Indiana University Press

Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science, and the Spiritual - Second Edition

This sumptuous and stunningly illustrated book shows through words and images how directly, profoundly, and indisputably modern science has transformed modern art.
 Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, a strange and exciting new world came into focus--a world of microorganisms in myriad shapes and colors, prehistoric fossils, bizarre undersea creatures, spectrums of light and sound, molecules of water, and atomic particles. Exploring the Invisible reveals that the world beyond the naked eye--made visible by advances in science--has been a major inspiration for artists ever since, influencing the subjects they choose as well as their techniques and modes of representation.
 Lynn Gamwell traces the evolution of abstract art through several waves, beginning with Romanticism. She shows how new windows into telescopic and microscopic realms--combined with the growing explanatory importance of mathematics and new definitions of beauty derived from science--broadly and profoundly influenced Western art. Art increasingly reflected our more complex understanding of reality through increasing abstraction. For example, a German physiologist's famous demonstration that color is not in the world but in the mind influenced Monet's revolutionary painting with light. As the first wave of enthusiasm for science crested, abstract art emerged in Brussels and Munich. By 1914, it could be found from Moscow to Paris.
 Throughout the book are beautiful images from both science and art--some well known, others rare--that reveal the scientific sources mined by Impressionist and Symbolist painters, Art Nouveau sculptors and architects, Cubists, and other nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists.
 With a foreword by astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson, Exploring the Invisible appears in an age when both artists and scientists are exploring the deepest meanings of life, consciousness, and the universe.

History & Criticism

Princeton University Press

A cultural history of the links between mathematics and art, from antiquity to today
This is a cultural history of mathematics and art, from antiquity to the present. Mathematicians and artists have long been on a quest to understand the physical world they see before them and the abstract objects they know by thought alone. Taking readers on a tour of the practice of mathematics and the philosophical ideas that drive the discipline, Lynn Gamwell points out the important ways mathematical concepts have been expressed by artists. Sumptuous illustrations of artworks and cogent math diagrams are featured in Gamwell's comprehensive exploration.
Gamwell begins by describing mathematics from antiquity to the Enlightenment, including Greek, Islamic, and Asian mathematics. Then focusing on modern culture, Gamwell traces mathematicians' search for the foundations of their science, such as David Hilbert's conception of mathematics as an arrangement of meaning-free signs, as well as artists' search for the essence of their craft, such as Aleksandr Rodchenko's monochrome paintings. She shows that self-reflection is inherent to the practice of both modern mathematics and art, and that this introspection points to a deep resonance between the two fields: Kurt Gödel posed questions about the nature of mathematics in the language of mathematics and Jasper Johns asked "What is art?" in the vocabulary of art. Throughout, Gamwell describes the personalities and cultural environments of a multitude of mathematicians and artists, from Gottlob Frege and Benoît Mandelbrot to Max Bill and Xu Bing.
Mathematics and Art demonstrates how mathematical ideas are embodied in the visual arts and will enlighten all who are interested in the complex intellectual pursuits, personalities, and cultural settings that connect these vast disciplines.

Mathematics and Art: A Cultural History

How science changed the way artists understand reality
Exploring the Invisible shows how modern art expresses the first secular, scientific worldview in human history. Now fully revised and expanded, this richly illustrated book describes two hundred years of scientific discoveries that inspired French Impressionist painters and Art Nouveau architects, as well as Surrealists in Europe, Latin America, and Japan.
Lynn Gamwell describes how the microscope and telescope expanded the artist's vision into realms unseen by the naked eye. In the nineteenth century, a strange and exciting world came into focus, one of microorganisms in a drop of water and spiral nebulas in the night sky. The world is also filled with forces that are truly unobservable, known only indirectly by their effects―radio waves, X-rays, and sound-waves. Gamwell shows how artists developed the pivotal style of modernism―abstract, non-objective art―to symbolize these unseen worlds. Starting in Germany with Romanticism and ending with international contemporary art, she traces the development of the visual arts as an expression of the scientific worldview in which humankind is part of a natural web of dynamic forces without predetermined purpose or meaning. Gamwell reveals how artists give nature meaning by portraying it as mysterious, dangerous, or beautiful.
With a foreword by Neil deGrasse Tyson and a wealth of stunning images, this expanded edition of Exploring the Invisible draws on the latest scholarship to provide a global perspective on the scientists and artists who explore life on Earth, human consciousness, and the space-time universe.

Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science, and the Spiritual – Revised and Expanded Edition

In this book, Lynn Gamwell and Nancy Tomes explore the historical roots of Americans' understanding of madness today. Drawing on a rich array of sources, the authors interweave the perceptions of medical practitioners, the mentally ill and their families, and journalists, poets, novelists, and artists. As they trace successive ways of explaining madness and treating those judged insane, Gamwell and Tomes vividly depict the political and cultural dimensions of American attitudes toward mental illness. Gamwell and Tomes observe telling differences in the ways in which patients of different genders, races, and classes have been diagnosed and treated. The authors demonstrate how definitions of madness figured in national debates over abolitionism, women's rights, and alternative medicine. Madness in America also considers how the boundaries between sanity and insanity have been repeatedly redrawn in such areas as sexual behavior and criminality.

Madness in America: Cultural and Medical Perceptions of Mental Illness Before 1914 (Cornell Studies in the History of Psychiatry)

History

Tomes, Nancy

Americas

NCROL

This book presents a refreshing new approach to avant-garde art by demonstrating that a genuine core of modernism manifests a positive, joyful outlook. In contrast to those who see disintegration and negativity as the most authentic artistic responses to this century's gloomy zeitgeist, Donald Kuspit and Lynn Gamwell present twentieth-century art that has emotionally and intellectually affirmed life. Lavishly illustrated, their book includes colorful images of paintings, sculptures, decorative arts for the home, and gardens. In his essay, "Happiness, Health, and Related Anomalies of Avant-Garde Art," Kuspit characterizes most avant-garde art, such as Duchamp's "readymates," as psychologically adolescent - youthfully rebellious, destructive of the past, and emotionally unstable - but singles out certain rare artists, notably Matisse, as being avant-garde in the mature sense of joining a historical tradition, striking a balance between the self's pursuits of happiness and social reality, and acknowledging suffering while transcending it with positive feelings for life. In "Arcadian Impulses in Avant-Garde Art," Gamwell focuses on the intellectual dimensions of health and happiness, noting the large role that nature has assumed as a subject of life-affirming avant-garde art. Certain artists who have been receptive to the broad intellectual climate of modernism - especially the secular, scientific revolution in our understanding of nature - have created therapeutic landscapes, gardens of love, and, most distinctive of the avant-garde art, abstract art that symbolically presents the new cosmology.

Health and Happiness in 20Th-Century Avant-Garde Art

Kuspit, Donald

State University of New York at Binghamton Art Museum

Cubist Criticism (Studies in the Fine Arts)

UMI Research Press

Shows examples of the California sulptor's works in clay and bronze, and discusses his unique, archaic style

Stephen De Staebler: The Figure

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Destaebler, Stephen

Chronicle Books LLC.

A breeze blows, a wheel turns, a soldier springs to life and spears a giant spider. Such fanciful woodcarvings are in the American Folk Art tradition of whirligigs, which is continued today by Peter Gelker in his twirling figures in the throws of myths, dreams, and nightmares. Gelker was introduced to whirligigs by his father, a machinist, who learned to carve growing up in the Depression-era Midwest near the Ozarks. Gelker left rural life and manual labor for an academic life in California, where he enrolled in medical school and studied psychiatry. But his rural roots kept sprouting and flowering in his passion for crafting metaphors for the human mindâ€”and its neurological substrateâ€”which he encountered on his day-job. Thus Gelker senior passed a Folk Art tradition on to his son, who makes serious toys for a mad-cap world. Whirligigs have a place in the history of psychiatry, in which Gelker holds an M.D., and psychoanalysis, in which he is certified. Sigmund Freud recognized that people use jokes to inflict pain (he collected â€œJewish jokesâ€), but Freud also stressed the healing power of humor (The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious, 1905). While being careful not to trivialize suffering, the creator of a comic antic encourages us to not take our troubles too seriously, makes us laugh, and helps us to see through to a brighter day. The role of toys and games in child development began being studied in the 1930s-40s by the Austrian analyst Melanie Klein, and after World War II, her student, the British pediatrician Donald Winnicott, expanded her work to include toys for adults (sports cars, designer clothes), in so-called object relations psychotherapy. Following this lead, today mental health professionals ask: Why do we collect certain objects? How do games of make-believe help us navigate our way through the labyrinth of life? Why do so many people find comfort in Folk Art? Why do Peter Gelkerâ€™s whirligigs make us smile?

Whirligigs: The Art of Peter Gelker

Grand Central Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by GAMWELL, Lynn. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by GAMWELL, Lynn

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by GAMWELL, Lynn. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Color and Form: The Geometric Sculptures of Morton C. Bradley, Jr.

Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science, and the Spiritual - Second Edition

Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science, and the Spiritual - Second Edition

Mathematics and Art: A Cultural History

Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science, and the Spiritual – Revised and Expanded Edition

Madness in America: Cultural and Medical Perceptions of Mental Illness Before 1914 (Cornell Studies in the History of Psychiatry)

Health and Happiness in 20Th-Century Avant-Garde Art

Cubist Criticism (Studies in the Fine Arts)

Stephen De Staebler: The Figure

Whirligigs: The Art of Peter Gelker