The age of insight The quest to understand the unconscious in art, mind, and brain : from Vienna 1900 to the present

Review by Booklist Review

Inspired by his interest in expressionist artists Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele, Kandel subjects their oeuvres to intensive analysis that integrates Freudian and Gestalt psychology, art history, and neuroscience. A Nobel laureate for his scientific research, covered in his memoir In Search of Memory (2006), Kandel sets several aims for his discussion. The radical direction taken by the expressionists induces Kandel's consideration of their immediate influences, be they fascination with Freud's theories (by Klimt, especially), the emotional tides of their personal lives, or painting's general drift from realism. This trio certainly accelerated the last, and the human emotions evoked by their portraits and nudes, dozens of which the book reproduces, attract Kandel's discerning observations. Art historians Ernst Kris and Ernst Gombrich, who later critiqued the revolution Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele wrought, help Kandel link his application of scientific studies of visual perception and the viewer's experience of the expressionists and art in general. Can science and art appreciators coexist for Kandel's prime readers? Yes, if they are not casual readers and are ready for his involved explorations of their interests.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this engrossing if overstuffed treatise, Nobel-winning neuroscientist Kandel (In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind) excavates the hidden workings of the creative mind. He starts with the art of Viennese Modernist painters Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele, linking their distorted imagery, intense evocations of neurotic emotion, and frank erotic themes to Freud's contemporaneous theorizing on the unconscious mind and repressed sexuality. From there Kandel leaps to the hard science of how unconscious neural mechanisms underlying everything from visual perception to emotional impulses determine conscious aesthetic reactions. (It's the varying acuities of the retina's cone cells, he contends, that make the Mona Lisa's smile so enigmatic.) Kandel writes perceptively about a range of topics, from art history-the book's color reproductions alone make it a great browse-to dyslexia. Inevitably, his brush-strokes-to-brain waves ambition to integrate so many subjects feels a ill-chewed; it's either too dense or too sketchy, and too quick to assimilate Freudian-modernist notions of the unconscious to scientific concepts. Still, Kandel captures the reader's imagination with intriguing historical syntheses and fascinating scientific insights into how we see-and feel-the world. (Mar. 27) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

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Review by Library Journal Review

Nobel Prize winner Kandel (neuro-science, Columbia Univ.; In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind) has written a book about the flowering of art, psychology, and medicine in his native Vienna at the turn of the 20th century. He describes the linked influences and interactions of Sigmund Freud; artists Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele; writer Arthur Schnitzler; and art historians Alois Riegl, Ernst Kris, and Ernst Gombrich, and he follows their work to the present day in order to paint a coherent picture of what cognitive scientists now believe is occurring in the brains of artists as they create and audiences as they encounter powerful works of art. VERDICT Kandel, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work in finding the physical location of memory within neurons, here uses neuroscience to take on the creative mind. The result is a fascinating synthesis of art, history, and science that is also accessible to the general reader. A distinctive and important title that is also a pleasure to read; highly recommended to even the occasional reader of serious nonfiction. [See Prepub Alert, 9/11/11.]-Mary Ann Hughes, Shelton, WA (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

In Search of Memory, 2006, etc.) is uniquely equipped for this vast task. Born in Vienna, a collector of Klimt and Kokoschka, a scientist of the first rank, the author possesses in abundance the myriad requirements for such an integrative enterprise. Moving seamlessly and effortlessly between the worlds of art and science, Kandel begins with a look at the art world of Vienna, 1900. Then it's off to Freud, whose theories and discoveries the author treats with great respect, awarding credit where it's due, noting but not condemning errors. Kandel also glances at innovations in literature, especially the technique of interior monologue pioneered by Arthur Schnitzler in his Lieutenant Gustl (1900). Some sexy chapters ensue as Kandel discusses sexuality in art, and sex remains a leitmotif. He looks at how painters reveal the interior states of their subjects, and he examines the theories and discoveries of neuroscientists--though he continually returns to the art world for illustration, elaboration and example. Kandel reminds us that the brain creates the world for us: Our poor eyes bring in only a fraction of what's there; the brain assembles and interprets, using memory as a principal guide. Readers will also learn how artists can make a subject's eyes seem to follow the viewer, how scientists have used animals and imaging to explore the brain and how artists employ models' faces, hands and attitude to affect us, to prompt our empathy. Kandel also investigates the nature of creativity. A transformative work that joins the hands of Art and Science and makes them acknowledge their close kinship.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Chapter 1   An Inward Turn: Vienna 1900   In 2006 ronald lauder, a collector of austrian expres-sionist art and the co-founder of the Neue Galerie, the expressionist museum in New York City, spent the extraordinary sum of $135 million to purchase a single painting: Gustav Klimt's captivating, gold-encrusted portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, a Viennese socialite and patroness of the arts. Lauder first saw Klimt's 1907 painting in the Upper Belvedere Museum when he visited Vienna as a fourteen-year-old and was smitten by the image. She seemed to epitomize turn-of-the-century Vienna: its richness, its sensuality, and its capacity for innovation. Over the years Lauder became convinced that Klimt's portrait of Adele (Fig. 1-1) was one of the great depictions of the mystery of womanhood.   As the elements of Adele's dress attest, Klimt was indeed a skilled decorative painter in the nineteenth-century tradition of Art Nouveau. But the painting has an additional, historical meaning: it is one of Klimt's first paintings to depart from a traditional three-dimensional space and move into a modern, flattened space that the artist decorated luminously. The painting reveals Klimt as an innovator and major contributor to the emergence of Austrian Modernism in art. The Klimt historians Sophie Lillie and Georg Gaugusch describe Adele Bloch-Bauer I in the following terms:   [Klimt's] painting not only rendered Bloch-Bauer's irresistible beauty and sensuality; its intricate ornamentation and exotic motifs heralded the dawn of Modernity and a culture intent on radically forging a new identity. With this painting, Klimt created a secular icon that would come to stand for the aspirations of a whole generation in fin-de-siècle Vienna. 1   In this painting Klimt abandons the attempt of painters from the early Renaissance onward to re-create with ever-increasing realism the three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional canvas. Like other modern artists faced with the advent of photography, Klimt sought newer truths that could not be captured by the camera. He, and particularly his younger protégés Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele, turned the artist's view inward--away from the three-dimensional outside world and toward the multidimensional inner self and the unconscious mind.   In addition to this break with the artistic past, the painting shows us how modern science, particularly modern biology, influenced Klimt's art, as it did much of the culture of "Vienna 1900," or Vienna during the period between 1890 and 1918. As the art historian Emily Braun has documented, Klimt read Darwin and became fascinated with the structure of the cell--the primary building block of all living things. Thus, the small iconographic images on Adele's dress are not simply decorative, like other images in the Art Nouveau period. Instead, they are symbols of male and female cells: rectangular sperm and ovoid eggs. These biologically inspired fertility symbols are designed to match the sitter's seductive face to her full-blown reproductive capabilities.   the fact that the Adele Bloch-Bauer portrait was magnificent enough to fetch $135 million--the most ever paid for a single painting up to that time--is all the more extraordinary considering that at the beginning of Klimt's career his work, although highly competent, was unremarkable. He was a good but conventional painter, a decorator of theaters, museums, and other public buildings who followed the grand historicist, conventional style of his teacher, Hans Makart (Fig. 1-2). Like Makart, a talented colorist who was called the new Rubens by the Viennese patrons of art who idolized him, Klimt painted large portraits dealing with allegorical and mythological themes (Fig. 1-3).   It was not until 1886 that Klimt's work took a bold, original turn. That year, he and his colleague Franz Matsch were each asked to commemorate the auditorium of the Old Castle Theatre, which was about to be demolished and replaced by a modern structure. Matsch painted a view of the stage from the entrance, and Klimt portrayed the last performance at the old theater. But rather than painting a view of the stage or the actors on it, Klimt painted specific, recognizable members of the audience as seen from the stage. These members of the audience were not attending to the play but to their own inner thoughts. The real drama of Vienna, Klimt's painting implies, did not take place on the stage, it took place in the private theater of the audience's mind (Figs. 1-4, 1-5).   Soon after Klimt painted the Old Castle Theatre, a young neurologist, Sigmund Freud, began treating patients who suffered from hysteria with a combination of hypnosis and psychotherapy. As his patients turned inward, freely associated, and talked about their private lives and thoughts, Freud connected their hysterical symptoms to traumas in their past. The paradigm for this highly original mode of treatment derived from Josef Breuer's study of an intelligent young Viennese woman known as "Anna O." Breuer, a senior colleague of Freud, had found that Anna's "monotonous family life and the absence of adequate intellectual occupation?.?.?.?[had] led to a habit of daydreaming"--what Anna referred to as her "private theater."2   The remarkable insight that characterized Klimt's later work was contemporaneous with Freud's psychological studies and presaged the inward turn that would pervade all fields of inquiry in Vienna 1900. This period, which gave rise to Viennese Modernism, was characterized by the attempt to make a sharp break with the past and to explore new forms of expression in art, architecture, psychology, literature, and music. It spawned an ongoing pursuit to link these disciplines.   in pioneering the emergence of Modernism, Vienna 1900 briefly assumed the role of cultural capital of Europe, a role in some respects similar to that assumed by Constantinople in the Middle Ages and by Florence in the fifteenth century. Vienna had been the center of the Habsburg dynastic lands since 1450 and gained further prominence a century later, when it became the center of the Holy Roman Empire of the German-Speaking Nation. The empire comprised not only the German-speaking states, but also the state of Bohemia and the kingdom of Hungary-Croatia. Over the next three hundred years, these disparate lands remained a mosaic of nations that had no common unifying name or culture. It was held together solely by the continuous rule of the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperors. In 1804 Francis II, the last of the Holy Roman Emperors, assumed the title Emperor of Austria as Francis I. In 1867 Hungary insisted on equal footing, and the Habsburg Empire became the Dual Monarchy, Austria-Hungary.   At the zenith of its power, in the eighteenth century, the Habsburg Empire was second only to the Russian Empire in the size of its European landholdings. Moreover, the Habsburg Empire had a long history of administrative stability. But a series of military losses in the latter half of the nineteenth century and civil unrest in the early twentieth century diminished the empire's political power, and the Habsburgs reluctantly turned away from geopolitical ambitions and toward a concern with the political and cultural aspirations of their people, especially the middle class.   In 1848 Austria's liberal middle class became energized and forced the country's absolute, almost feudal monarchy, dominated by the Emperor Franz Joseph, to evolve along more democratic lines. The ensuing reforms were based on a view of Austria as a progressive, constitutional monarchy modeled on those in England and France and characterized by a cultural and political partnership between the enlightened middle class and the aristocracy. This partnership was designed to reform the state, to support the secular cultural life of the nation, and to establish a free-market economy, all based on the modern belief that reason and science would replace faith and religion.       Excerpted from The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present by Eric Kandel All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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