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How Darwin changed the world… of art

Global Arab Network - - Maha Karim

Tuesday, 16 June 2009 13:24

Endless Forms – examining Charles Darwin’s impact on the visual arts – has this morning opened to the public at Cambridge University ’s Fitzwilliam Museum .

The ground-breaking exhibition, the largest the Fitzwilliam Museum has ever staged, reveals the little-known influence of Darwin’s revolutionary theories on artists of the 19th Century.

Featuring more than 200 exhibits from around the world, many on display for the first time in the UK , Endless Forms looks in detail at the debt Darwin owed to visual imagery – and how he in turn influenced artists such as Monet, Degas, Cezanne and Landseer.

The exhibition contrasts paintings, drawings and sculpture with skulls, early anthropological photographs, minerals and taxidermy.

It also looks at the interchange between science and art as it examines themes such as the history of the earth, the struggle for existence, animal kin, the descent of humankind, beauty and sexual selection and Darwin ’s impact on the impressionists.

Jane Munro, co-curator of Endless Forms and Keeper of Paintings, Drawings and Prints at the Fitzwilliam, said: “The implications of Darwin ’s revolutionary ideas of evolution by natural selection had a profound effect on society at large, putting in question man's relationship to the natural world and challenging the understanding of what it meant to be human.”

Entry to Endless Forms and the Fitzwilliam Museum is free. The exhibition runs until October 4, 2009.

As well as Endless Forms, The University’s Darwin Bicentenary celebrations continue apace in July.

From July 5-10, Cambridge University is home to the Darwin Festival 2009. Featuring speakers and performers including Sir Terry Pratchett, Ian McEwan, Ruth Padel and soprano Susan Gritton, the Festival is a showpiece event of the nationwide Darwin 200 celebrations.

Elsewhere, Cambridge University Library and The Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, will both launch Darwin exhibitions on July 7.

A Voyage Round the World, at the University Library, brings together the University’s huge collection of Darwin material from the voyage of the Beagle.

Darwin the Geologist at the Sedgwick Museum looks in detail at Darwin ’s lifelong love of geology and the rock specimens that informed his earliest scientific work.

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