ABSTRACT
A first obstacle is the division between art and science, and art and technology, as well as breaks between art and nature. Indeed, at least since the seventeenth century and the development of a science of aesthetics (Baumgarten, 1750), art is experienced as autonomous, and the philosophy of aesthetics has mainly developed as a science of perception. It is also true that art, specific to museums and exhibitions, was ordinarily considered as separate from nature, to the point that Kant was the first in his Critique of Judgment (1790) to fully formulate an aesthetic of nature. However, it is clear that these divisions, dramatic as they are, are not absolute. Artists have worked with scientists since at least the seventeenth century, if only to illustrate or to honour the wonders of nature or the natural treasures brought back from many naturalist expeditions. It took the art of photography and its ability to consider natural phenomena mechanically, and supposedly objectively, to upstage the art of drawing, betraying the subjectivity of the artist. However, this art is not completely abandoned, as shown by the work of Haeckel, the biologist who was also the founder of ecology, who published two volumes in 1904, (originally in sets of ten between 1899 and 1904), and an illustrative book of lithographs entitled Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature). His artistic talent was marked by natural symmetry, including those of unicellular microorganisms such as radiolarians. His lithographs had a decisive influence on the course of Art Nouveau in the early twentieth century, whose principals were the reintroduction of forms from the living world in human œuvres, whether of curves and scrolls or otherwise complex geometry. Artist/scientists historically accompanied expeditions of exploration during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as Europeans went in search of foreign lands and riches. The paintings of English artist John Webber (1751-93), for example, who accompanied Captain Cook to Polynesia, influenced an entire generation of interest in the ‘exotic’ peoples and plants of the Pacific. These illustrations, fraught with ethnocentric bias, nonetheless provide
valuable historical documentation of events (Cook’s death, for example) as well as botanical wonders, which in many cases are today extinct. Artists such as John White, Juan Vincente de la Cerda, B. L. Turner, and even George Catlin, to name a few, provide us today with a vision of the meeting of vastly different worlds, both cultural and physical.
