"The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and Brain from Vienna 1900 to the Present," by Eric R. Kandel.

I can't remember where I heard about "The Age of Insight", but I do remember going to my library's catalog immediately and looking it up.  I think I may have actually shouted for joy when I saw it was there and available.  Kandel's book looks at art and psychology in turn-of-the-century Vienna--specifically the development of the work of Freud, Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele and how they played off each other, combined with what we know about how our brains work, how we see, and how we interpret what we see.  It's a union of art history, psychology and neuroscience.  And that, my friends, is right up my alley. How violently my hopes were dashed.  I found so many unconvincing and troubling statements and bad art history interpretations after just a casual flip through the book's art images and captions as well as in the first 40 or so pages of the text that I gave up.  Dr. Kandel may know his neuroscience (I don't even know about that--I didn't get that far), but he does not know history or art history well enough or broadly enough to make this a worthwhile read.  For instance, his brief, flippant summary of the Enlightenment was completely off base, as if he had read Voltaire's  "Candide" and somehow missed that it was satire.  And his suggestion that Caravaggio's "Judith" was virginal and squeamish is the only such time I've heard that interpretation, and flies in the face of the actual image even if you know nothing of the prostitute who posed for it or the scoundrel of the artist who produced it. After practically every sentence I wanted to scream, "Stop begging the question and just come out with your Nobel-worthy insight already!".  But to no avail. I had such high hopes for this book--especially after seeing that Nobel Prize touted on the cover--I couldn't wait to get my hands on it.  I was totally let down.

"Proust Was A Neuroscientist," by Jonah Lehrer

If you're an artist or art lover, you're probably going to love this book.  If you're a scientist, you're probably going to hate this book.

I love both, so I'm torn.  Jonah Lehrer's basic premise here is that art has contributed more insight into how our brains work than science has...and in the cases presented here, art beat science by 50 or 100 years.  For instance, he looks at "Leaves of Grass," and determines that Walt Whitman had shaken off the old Cartesian mind/body divide long before scientists figured out that our thoughts and feelings were generated in our brains, with simple (grey) matter and energy, not a disembodied "mind" or "soul" pulling the strings.

Of course, it's easy to work backward from a new discovery and then find the precursors to it.   And that's what Lehrer does in each chapter.  He discusses Igor Stravinsky's "The Right of Spring" and it's impact on determining how our brains process music. Then there's Paul Cezanne's seemingly spontaneous painting and what it reveals about our vision.  He claims that Gertrude Stein discovered fundamental truths of linguistics long before that punk kid, Noam Chomsky, came on the scene.  And Proust, he claims, has much to teach us about memory.

Personally, I think Lehrer's science is lacking here.  However, the connections that he draws are often pretty insightful and the stories are interesting.  Plus, his passion is so evident and his writing style is so pleasing that I really can't just dismiss this book for failing to provide solid scientific evidence. It's value seems to lie elsewhere.

After all, the arts are in crisis right now, with major theatres, opera companies, museums, etc. having to close their doors.  We live in an age where art is seen as a luxury, and artists are devalued as dabblers and hobbyists.  What Lehrer is reminding us of in "Proust Was A Neuroscientist," is that the arts offer us insight into ourselves.  They hint at higher truths and point us to new ways of thinking so we can uncover them.  He takes Einstein's decree that "imagination is more important than knowledge," and gives us tangible examples of what artists have contributed to our knowledge and appreciation of the world.

Hopefully more people will read this book and think about the connections between art and science.  Hopefully it will serve as a wake up call that if we fail to support our artists we may also hinder the progress of our scientists.

"The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War," by Lynn H. Nicholas

I thought I had a pretty good understanding of what the German artists of the 1930’s had suffered. I knew that Hitler had fired the staff and completely shut down the Bauhaus school (founded by Gropius, it boasted a roster of amazing teachers including Klee, Kandinsky, van der Rohe & Albers). I knew that Beckmann and Ernst, like so many others, had fled across the Atlantic with as many of their works as they could salvage. I knew that the “degenerate” art exhibition that he put together to ridicule the modernists had succeeded in turning most of the German public against those artists. I knew that Kirchner had burned many of his own paintings just to prevent the Fuhrer from having the pleasure, and I knew that he eventually took his own life as a result of having over 600 of his works confiscated, then either sold or destroyed. But what I didn’t understand, until reading “The Rape of Europa,” was the sheer scale of the theft and destruction of art all over Europe carried out by the Nazi forces and very often ordered directly by Hitler himself, or the enormous number of art works still unaccounted for.

Nicholas spent 10 years researching her book and to say it is exhaustive would be an understatement. For such a scholarly work (and even for a not-so-scholarly work) it is a page turner from start to finish. There is so much drama, so much tension, so many “I can’t believe they did that!” moments, that as emotionally wrenching as it can be, it is infinitely readable and I had a hard time putting it down. Reading about the staff at the Louvre packing up their entire collection and shipping it out to the countryside sends a shiver down the spine. And every time I remember the words of one of their curators, as he sunk to the stairs watching “Winged Victory” being inched gently down a ramp and out the door, “I shall not see her returned,” I tear up. When I think about the Tchaikovsky museum being used by the Nazis as a motorcycle garage, and pages and pages of his original manuscripts found later with tire marks and oil on them, my hands curl into fists. When I remember the staff of the Hermitage Museum, whose collection is even larger than that of the Louvre, suffering through winters with broken windows, constantly under threat of shelling, taking turns chiseling ice from the walls, many of them starving to death during the siege, it breaks my heart.

There is always looting and destruction in war, but Hitler took it to a level never seen before. He stole the entire Amber Room from Catherine the Great’s palace—literally took every piece of amber lining the walls. To this day the panels have never surfaced. He took the enormous and invaluable Ghent altarpiece, painted by van Eyck and measuring over 15 feet wide, he had stone fountains disassembled and shipped to Berlin. And he sold or destroyed anything he didn’t want for himself or for his new museum.

After the war, castles and salt mines were found crammed floor to ceiling with art. Hundreds of rail cars, packed to capacity, on their way into or out of Germany were recovered. When the dozens of trucks carrying art back into Florence came parading down the streets, people gathered to cheer them on and to weep with joy that their cultural treasures were being brought back home.

More than 60 years later, however, the story is still not over. Tens of thousands of art works just from Poland alone have not yet been found and returned. The contemporary art world struggles constantly with determining the true provenance of pre-WWII artworks and most major museums and auction houses have been sued by holocaust survivors who claim rightful ownership of major pieces.

“The Rape of Europa” tells the first part of this story, and it is a complicated, emotional, and fascinating one.

If the book sounds interesting to you, you’ll also enjoy the documentary of the same name, which was an additional 6 years in the making. Here’s the trailer: http://www.rapeofeuropa.com/theTrailer.aspx

"Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation," by David Edwards

In "Artscience" Edwards presents an interesting look at how scientists and artists are moved to explore each others worlds, even to the point of earning advanced degrees in seemingly unrelated areas of their current expertise in order to expand their understanding and perceptions of what direction their work can and should take.

Chaos theory and music composition may seem to be worlds apart, but diving deeply into one can bring unexpected and varied insights into the other. By examining several examples of artists and scientists and researchers from France, Germany and the United States, he drives the point home again and again: we have much to learn from each other and we are capable of collaboration with people in very different fields. Perhaps Edwards' development of Le Laboratoire, an artscience center in Paris, can help usher in a new era of the Renaissance Man. It certainly feels to me that the West could stand to loosen it's grip on the idea of specialization a bit and we could all probably learn a lot by casting our nets wider.

As Einstein famously said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge." And Edwards shows us that knowledge of a discipline outside of our own can be a catalyst to spark the imagination and drive innovation. Pretty powerful stuff.

"Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy And Art," by Susan Aberth

Kudos to Susan Aberth for giving Carrington's work it's due in this beautifully illustrated and equally beautifully written book. I had seen a couple of Carrington's paintings via Janson's, but I really had no idea of the breadth and depth of her work, or of her fascinating life until I got hold of this. Her art has been repeatedly referred to as “surrealist” and “feminist,” although she herself never embraced those labels. To me her images are too personal to qualify for such broad and lazy terms, and instead bring to mind the work of outsider artist Henry Darger in that they are strange and otherworldly and although there is obviously a narrative right there in front of your nose, you’ll never really get the whole story unless you are the artist yourself. In this book the rich reproductions of Carrington's paintings and sculptures take center stage, as they should, but there is also plenty of substance beyond the alluring and mysterious imagery. Aberth gives us a mini-biography that reads like a fun and thrilling work of fiction, although the subject makes it all too easy.

Carrington was born in England and had an Irish nanny who introduced her to the Celtic myths and legends of witchcraft and the supernatural, and those early images would inform her work for the rest of her life. Fiercely independent, she went to Paris against her parents' better wishes and soon found herself in the Surrealists' circle. Max Ernst left his wife for her and when Hitler's troops were poised to take France, his internment (he was a German on French soil) drove her into a Spanish mental institution. Her stay there would also be fodder for numerous paintings and a brilliantly unusual novel, "The Hearing Trumpet." Via Peggy Guggenheim's influence, they both were able to secure passage out of Europe, along with several other leading artists of the day, and they settled in Mexico where they soon become part of the art world there, including being guests at Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo's wedding.

I checked this one out from my library, read the book cover to cover, poured over the glorious reproductions in detail, and when that wasn't enough, I purchased my own copy of it plus a copy of "The Hearing Trumpet" so I could experience Carrington's written work, too. (It demands its own review, which will be coming shortly.)

Carrington passed away just a few weeks ago, at the ripe old age of 94. While I was saddened deeply by the news, I was very glad to know that Aberth's book had been published a few years before she died, so she could enjoy seeing her work and life's memories collected for a new generation before she left us.