The Origins of the World. The Invention of Nature in the 19th Century.

Prologue

The nineteenth century is key to rethinking our relationship with nature. It was a century when the relationship between man and the natural world underwent a radical transformation. Efforts to inventory places, plants and animals expanded to all continents. The antiquity of the Earth and of life became apparent, and industrialisation and urbanization changed landscapes.

During this century, earth and life sciences as we now know them were born: biology, palaeontology, organic chemistry, physiology, geology, bacteriology, anthropology and ecology, to name but a few.
However, it was evolutionary theories in particular that fundamentally altered our conception of man, his origins, and his place in nature. With the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, human beings were incorporated into a genealogical tree encompassing all living things.
The exhibition revisits the ‘long nineteenth century’, from the French Revolution to World War I, and sets the main scientific milestones in counterpoint to developments in the artistic imagination.
The Prologue recalls the origin myths that have shaped the Western imagination: the biblical accounts of the creation of the world in six days; the Garden of Eden; the first parents – Adam and Eve – made ‘in the image of God’; the naming of the animals by Adam, the only creature with the power of speech; the Fall; the Flood; and finally, Noah’s Ark. The world of the Bible is a closed world, a garden created for man to use and tend.

From Curiosiy to Studiosity

Until the eighteenth century, the world was viewed as a garden in which nature was subservient to man. During the Renaissance, there was a proliferation of accurate descriptions of plants and animals in the first illustrated botanical and zoological treatises. Princes, humanists and scholars created cabinets of curiosities featuring naturalia (natural objects), artificialia (man-made objects) and mirabilia (unusual objects of wonder). Voyages of exploration encouraged the collection and acclimatisation in princely gardens and menageries of species that were unknown in Europe. The fascination with large animals such as rhinoceroses and giraffes inspired artists. The practice of collecting, inventorying, describing and classifying minerals, plants and animals seemed to be a re-enactment of Adam’s naming of the animals and brought the diversity of ‘new worlds’ within the orbit of Christian civilisation.
Naming species forms the central pillar of the work of the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), the father of modern binomial nomenclature (combining two Latin names) and classification by class, order, genus, species and variety.
The Comte de Buffon (1707–1788), the director of the King’s Garden and Cabinet of Natural History (1739), also attempted a complete inventory of nature, but he disregarded classifications, which he believed to be arbitrary, and instead sought out the ‘natural causes’ of phenomena. His atural History in thirtysix illustrated volumes (1749–89), was hugely popular.

The Immensity and Diversity of the World

set sail with the explorers Bougainville (1766), Cook (1768) and La Pérouse (1785), and plates illustrating their observations were published. However, in the nineteenth century, colonial expansion by European states led to a boom in maritime trade and scientific expeditions which included naturalists and artists. The number of species inventoried soared, and classifications based on a belief in the fixity of species could no longer account for the diversity of living things.
The exhibition explores three iconic expeditions: Nicolas Baudin’s expedition to Australia (1800–4) with the naturalist François Péron and artists Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, Nicolas-Martin Petit and Michel Garnier; Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland’s expedition to South America (1799–1804), which earned Humboldt the title ‘Second Columbus’ and marked the beginnings of ecological thinking; and Charles Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle to South America and Australia (1832–35).
Nature and animal painters, and landscape artists inspired by Humboldt’s ‘geography of plants’ in particular, illustrated the diversity of species. Animals found their way into the new natural history museums and zoological gardens. Exotic plants were introduced to greenhouses and botanic gardens. Developments in oceanography led to a craze for aquariums and life in the ocean depths. Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1869), superbly illustrated by Neuville and Riou, captured the imagination of his contemporaries.

The Antiquity of the Earth

n the early nineteenth century, geology revealed the incredible antiquity of the Earth, which had been thought to be just a few thousand years old until this point. The image of a world shaped over a long period of time, calculated in hundreds of thousands years, replaced the world created in six days described in Scripture. Scholars discussed the biblical Flood, glaciers, and volcanoes (neptunism and volcanism). Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) in France and William Buckland (1784–1856) in Britain accounted for the extinction and succession of species in terms of catastrophes (catastrophism). For his part, the geologist Charles Lyell (1797–1875) championed ‘uniformitarianism’, which advanced a theory of slow and gradual change and the permanence of processes that occurred in the distant past. The past could therefore be deduced from our knowledge of the present.
The study of fossils revealed the very ancient origins of life. Cuvier’s discovery of extinct species challenged biblical chronology and ‘fixism’ (the absence of change in species). Dinosaurs intrigued and fascinated people, but how could this extinct bestiary be reproduced? In 1854, life-size models of dinosaurs were erected at the Crystal Palace in London in a sort of forerunner of Jurassic Park.
The discovery of prehistoric human bones also raised a large number of questions about the appearance and lifestyle of early man. The scientific populariser Louis Figuier (1819–1894) published a large number of reconstructions of primitive life, and some artists specialised in depicting Stone Age man.

Evolution

The discovery of the antiquity of the world, the explosion in the number of species, and the study of their geographical distribution provided the foundations for evolutionism. The dominant depiction in the West of a great linear chain of being ranging from the inorganic right up to God thus gave way to the model of a tree with a multiplicity of branches in which all species are connected genealogically.
There were different interpretations of evolution in France, Britain and Germany. Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck (1744–1829) introduced the principle of the modification of species over time by continuous adaptation to unstable environments. Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) developed the theory of natural selection as the main mechanism of evolution, to which Darwin added sexual selection. In 1866, Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) asserted that man was descended from ape-like ancestors and became an advocate of Darwinism. Influenced by Goethe and his idea of the unity of nature in all its metamorphoses, he emphasised the origins of life in the inorganic world and the ‘recapitulation’ of the history of evolution of the species (phylogenesis) during the development of the individual (ontogenesis). French Neo-Lamarckists such as the zoologist Edmond Perrier (1844–1921), and the Russian anarchist scholar Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921), highlighted cooperation and solidarity between species rather than the ‘struggle for existence’.

Monkeys as Mirrors?

Iconography featuring monkeys reflects our confusion vis-à-vis our ape ancestors and the fantastical quest for a ‘missing link’ between animals and humans. The appealing or humorous singeries (monkey art) popular in the eighteenth century, which depicted monkeys imitating humans, gave way to more disturbingly bestial depictions in the case of Emmanuel Frémiet (1824–1910) and Alfred Kubin (1877–1959), and the disconcertingly humanised portraits of Darwinist and spiritualist Gabriel von Max (1840–1915). Von Max was familiar with monkeys and kept them as pets.
Gustave Moreau (1826–1898) used life sketches of monkeys as models for his illustrations for La Fontaine’s Fables, but also for unusual paintings in which monkeys are realistic and highly expressive, unlike his often hieratic human models. Cinema also explored the ambiguous relationship between man and monkeys in films ranging from The Doctor and the Monkey by Georges Mélies (1900) to King Kong by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack (1933), which blazed the trail for many more.

Hybrids and Chimeras

Is man ‘just another animal?’ How do we express the problematic coexistence of our humanity and animality? Mythology is teeming with hybrid creatures such as centaurs, minotaurs, mermaids and other chimeras, which were depicted by late nineteenth-century artists in the light of new scientific knowledge and presented new aesthetic solutions to the man–animal nexus. Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901) was fascinated by the research carried out at the zoological research station in Naples set up by his friend Anton Dohrn, an unruly disciple of Haeckel whom he painted as a joyful triton, and he populated his paintings with ‘realistic’ and ironic mermaids and centaurs. Rodin’s Centauress embodies a painful tension between an animal body and a human torso, and Fish-Woman’s face is disturbingly hybrid. The fantastical bestiary of Jean Carriès (1855–1894) was inspired by medieval gargoyles, his fascination with Japanese art, and the Symbolist aesthetic of metamorphosis, which often depicts hybrid creatures and the origins of life in water.

In Search of Origins – Ontogenesis and Phylogenesis

In Europe, Darwinism was primarily disseminated by the writings of German zoologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919). He developed the idea of ‘recapitulation’ shared by Darwin: the development of the individual – ontogenesis – repeating in shorthand the development of the species – phylogenesis. This theory of a ‘threefold parallelism between embryological, systematic and paleontological development of the organism’ opened up an ‘era of genealogy’. It is central to the theories of Freud (1856–1939) on child sexuality and neuroses viewed as ‘regressions’ to the infancy of the species. In Thalassa (1924), his student Sándor Ferenczi (1873–1933) takes these ‘phylogenetic fantasies’ a step further by theorising nostalgia for the maternal womb as a regression to the marine origins of life, and the death instinct as a return to the peace of the inorganic world.
Writers and artists were passionate about genealogy, and about the primitive stages of life. Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), who had read Haeckel, wrote in The Temptation of St Anthony (1874): ‘I am the contemporary of origins. I dwelt in that formless world where hermaphroditic beasts slumbered ... when fingers, fins and limbs were blended...’. Painters introduced single-cell organisms, marine animals and embryonic forms into ill-defined worlds or into the secrets of motherhood.

Nature the Artist

The impact of evolutionism in France coincided with the rise of Impressionism; painters read Darwin, Haeckel, Ludwig Büchner and popular science magazines. Claude Monet (1840–1926), a free-thinking Republican, brother of a chemist, and friend of Georges Clemenceau, moved in circles where evolutionary theory was discussed. Critics have often highlighted his interest in light and the nature of sensations, according to the theory of vision of Hermann von Helmholtz, which was translated into French in 1867. However, with his Water Lilies, he was exploring nature as a creator of forms, demonstrating its generative energy while hinting at abstraction.
In 1890, Odilon Redon moved away from his ‘noirs’ and became a colourist: ‘I have embraced colour’, he wrote. He also turned towards larger formats, notably for the decorative scheme at the château of Domecy-sur-le-Vault. His paintings and pastels express his wonder at the light and splendours of a natura naturans – a nature in continuous metamorphosis.
The world of the infinitely small, botany and the ocean depths provided inspiration for the decorative arts as well (Binet, Gallé, Tiffany, Roux). Émile Gallé created a number of works on the theme of the underwater world, including his vase The Sea Bed (1889), in an aquatic environment, and Hand with Seaweed and Shells, the master glassmaker’s last great work.

From Evolutionism to Esoterism

In response to evolutionism, a number of artists rejected the ‘naturalisation’ of man. They sought out a new form of spirituality and secular immortality in various esoteric movements which were influential at the turn of the century. Gabriel von Max and František Kupka were interested in spiritualism; Wassily Kandinsky, Kupka, Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian sought in theosophy and anthroposophy a means of allowing the spirit to rise above the material, and embraced abstraction.
In his theoretical work Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky describes the change produced ‘when religion, science and morality are shaken’; only the arts, painting and music can offer an escape from ‘the dark picture of the present time’, as long as new ‘pure forms’ can be found. The Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, who was also inspired by theosophy and anthroposophy, painted pictures and watercolours depicting a materialisation of the soul, the ages of life, and the geometry of the universe. Piet Mondrian represented the evolution of the spirit towards the astral plane, and then the divine plane of the theosophists.

Epilogue

With its carnage, the Great War struck the death knell for the ‘long nineteenth century’ which you have just explored. Spelling the end of the old Europe, it ushered in a horrific era in which twisted versions of Darwinian theories (a purely ‘zoological’ idea of man, social Darwinism, eugenics) were incorporated into totalitarian ideologies in the quest to create a ‘new man’ by selection and the elimination of those deemed to be inferior. Technology extended from the global production of manufactured goods to the fabrication of weapons with unlimited power.
At the same time, research into biology and genetics definitively proved our relationship with all living beings, bringing our destinies together in a single ecosystem.
And yet, the ‘continuism’ that inserts man into a long animal genealogy has not revived the old idea of a world ‘full’ of living forms each of which is necessary for the harmony of the whole. On the contrary, what has emerged is the idea of a ‘superhuman’ who has left his animal ancestry far behind him and yearns to recreate man and the world.
Nature has two faces. She is a generous mother, who produces a multiplicity of admirable forms. At the same time, she’s a wicked stepmother who doesn’t care about her children. Nature has laws, but its laws are not human. It kills and destroys, as it continually engenders new forms of life.
In the early twenty-first century, with climate change and the sixth mass extinction of species, must we once again consider the Earth as a closed, finite world threatened with annihilation? Will we be able to rethink our relationship with Nature, our cradle? Will we be able to preserve its diversity and perhaps rediscover the sense of wonder that its beauty aroused in the artists and poets of the past?