U.C. Berkeley History of Art

Histart 192F.1

UNDERGRADUATE SEMINAR: DARWIN AND VISUAL CULTURE (4 units)

In the light of the explosion of new scholarship in the wake of the Darwin bicentenary of 2009, this seminar explores artists' visualization of evolution by natural selection (as well as other Darwinian ideas such as sexual selection and pangenesis) from the era of Darwin himself to the rise of the "neo-Darwinian synthesis" after World War Two, when the emergence of population genetics, the model of mutation in the replication of DNA, the rise of ethology and sociobiology, the consolidation of "evolutionary-developmental biology" ("evo-devo"), and other factors changed the overall look of Darwinism as a later nineteenth-century reader or artist would have encountered it or could have understood it. The seminar will certainly examine how visual artists between 1859 and 1939 represented evolutionary processes and dealt visually and artistically with Darwin's ideas and the many challenges to them. But it will also consider a question that has risen to prominence recently, namely, the question of a specifically Darwinian aesthetics or evolutionary account of the emergence, function, and future of art, whether or not that art specifically represents or addresses Darwinian processes in nature or society. This will require not only that we consider how Darwin and Darwinians represented naturalelection but also how Darwin and Darwinians conceived the evolutionary origin of "the sense of beauty" or the "art sense." The seminar will be based in part on a special exhibition of Darwiniana at the Bancroft Library in Fall 2009 and on the scholarship presented at a major international symposium on Darwin and the Art of Evolution at the Courtauld Institute of Art in Londonin July, 2009, as well as select materials drawn from the Darwinconferences at Cambridge and in Berlin in summer 2009. Due to our work in University special collections, the seminar will be limited to six students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor.