Darwin: Art and the Search for Origins

Shirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany Until 3 May 2009.

Online collection.

When he boarded HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin made room in his luggage for a copy of Alexander von Humboldt's Personal Narrative, the account of the German explorer's 1799–1804 journeys in Latin America. Humboldt's view of the natural world was a major influence on the young Darwin, until his own experiences led him to a different interpretation. Where Humboldt the romantic saw unity and harmony, Darwin the scientist saw strife and struggle.

With the spread of illustrated print magazines, artists of the time could hardly overlook the debate among scientists, theologians and philosophers over Darwin's destabilizing theories of evolution and ruthless natural selection. The exhibition Darwin: Art and the Search for Origins, running until 3 May at the Shirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, Germany, looks at how artists responded in the century following the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

Some of the works are straightforward attempts to promote one side of the argument, but most incorporate concepts that evolutionary theory made inevitable, such as 'deep time'. Not all of the displayed works embrace Darwinism; for example, those of Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900) tried to reconcilegeological and religious accounts of Earth's history in support of anti-evolutionist positions. But the attitude of his contemporary, Martin Johnson Heade (1819–1904), shifted in favour of Darwinism as he became more familiar with it — as his sublime late series on hummingbirds and orchids shows.

Credit: SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE, FRANKFURT

Some of the most interesting artistic responses to Darwinism happened in German-speaking countries in the intellectual wake of Humboldt. The exhibition includes many works by Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), the German scientist and artist who promoted Darwin's theories in continental Europe with his exquisite illustrations of sea creatures, particularly the radiolarians. But it is also replete with works less well known as Darwinian.

Arnold Böcklin's Meeresidylle (1887) references the evolutionary continuity of humanity with creatures of the sea. It was painted a few years after the Swiss artist forged a friendship with Anton Dohrn, a former student ofHaeckel who established a zoological institute in Naples, Italy. The institute's mission was to collect empirical data substantiating Darwin's ideas. Böcklin's work was steeped in mythology, and few critics understood it. Karl Scheffler was an exception: in 1921 he proclaimed Böcklin to be “the painter and poet of Darwinism”.

The exhibition also contains works by the convinced Darwinist, Gabriel von Max (1840–1915). As a friend of Haeckel, von Max was a passionate naturalist, but eventually departed from Haeckel's view that humans were the pinnacle of Darwinistic achievement. He came to prefer the pet monkeys he used as models, painting them carrying out human activities (as in Monkey Before A Skeleton; pictured) such as teaching or learning. In another famous image, his monkeys are portrayed as art critics (see Nature 438, 289; 2005).

A successful artist in his day, von Max made enough money to accumulate a vast collection of more than 60,000 zoological, anthropological and ethnological objects. Sold to theGerman city of Mannheim in 1917, renowned prehistorian Carl Schuchhardt described it as “the richest and most interesting private collection in the field of science since the death of Goethe”. Part of this collection is included in this thought-provoking exhibition.