The Age of Insight

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 t

social sciences.
Scientific American

Eric Kandel s book is a stunning achievement, remarkable for its scientific, artistic, and historical insights. No one else could have written this book all its readers will be amply rewarded.
Howard Gardner, Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education
 
Eric Kandel s training as a psychiatrist and his vast knowledge of how the brain works enrich this thoroughly original exploration of the relationship between the birth of psychoanalysis, Austrian Expressionism, and Modernism in Vienna.
Margaret Livingstone, Professor of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School
 
This is the book that Charles Darwin would have produced, had he chosen to write about art and aesthetics. Kandel, one of the great pioneers of modern neuroscience, has effectively bridged the two cultures science and humanities. This is a task that many philosophers, especially those called new mysterians, had considered impossible.
V. S. Ramachandran, author of The Tell-Tale Brain


Eric Kandel has created a masterpiece, synthesizing brain, mind, and art like no one has before.
Joseph LeDoux, NYU, author of The Emotional Brain and Synaptic Self

[This book] offers not only a stunning organic (in every sense of the word) view of fin de siecle culture but also opens new vistas in bioesthetics. It explores the often shocking neurology of the beautiful. And it shows how artist and scientist interlace in the common quest to discover the innards of reality. I don t render the visible, said Paul Klee, I make visible. He echoed Edna St. Vincent Millay s Euclid alone looked on beauty bare. Eric Kandel is of that company.
Frederic Morton

Nobel laureate Eric Kandel s path-setting exploration of the connections between neuroscience and the painters Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka establishes a new frontier in the study of this all-important historical period. The shift toward a biological conception of self, which began in Vienna over a hundred years ago, has since decisively shaped our understanding of human nature.
Jane Kallir, director, Galerie St. Etienne

With infectuous enthusiasm and limitless reverence for his multiple subjects, Kandel deftly steers the reader through a vast and inviting territory of science, the creative process, the mind, emotion, eroticism, empathy, feminism, and the unconscious. Years in the making, this highly readable book presents a magisterial study of brain, mind, and art.
Alessandra Comini, University Distinguished Professor of Art History Emerita, Southern Methodist University