The Art of Innovation: From Enlightenment to Dark Matter
Fascinating exhibition at the Science Museum looking at how artists and scientists explore
new ideas.
I’d been looking
for an exhibition like this for a while with the art of the Enlightenment at
the heart of it. The show told 20 stories over four themes to highlight
interactions between scientists and artists and how they inspired each other
both then and over the centuries since. From the first large picture by Joseph
Wright of Derby I was hooked.
The first section
looked at sociable science and explained the ideas of the Enlightenment via the
Wright of Derby picture. It also had a fascinating section on the invention of
artificial dyes in the Victorian era and the reaction against them from artists
and designers. All art types were covered so a section on the invention of
artificial fibres used the film “The Man in the White Suit” as its artistic
example. It also looked at how Polaroid partnered with Ansel Adams to promote
its cameras.
My favourite
section, Troubled Horizons, looked at what constitutes progress. Turner’s
“Rain, Steam and Speed” was used to talk about the standardisation of railway
time. I loved Philipe-Jacque de Loutherbourg’s picture of a landscape changed
by industry showing Coalbrookdale at night from 1801. It shows a blazing sky as
the factory continues to work through the night. It also included a huge
drawing by James Nasmyth of the surface of the moon based on his observations
and plaster models, one of which was featured here too.
Other highlights
included a look at the bicycle as an agent of social change and how this was
represented by artists, how high speed photography was used by people like
Muybridge to study movement and artists in the 1950s responded to x-ray
crystallography such as Helen Magaw’s designs for the Festival of Britain.
Closes on 26
January 2020
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