MEDIA & THE ARTS
The Forbidden Link
Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the
Visual Arts, an exhibit at the Yale Center for British Art
REVIEWED BY DAVID ROTHENBERG
NATuRE IS bEAu TIful, complex, eternal.
And yet it is always changing. Why does it
take all the forms it does—by necessity,
randomness, or invention? The possibility
that all its myriad shapes and species might
have evolved over millions of years had
been in the air for a few centuries before
Charles Darwin came up with a picture of
how this change could have come about.
How did he do it? Darwin paid close attention to the details of the natural world
through firsthand experience and deep appreciation. He loved nature so much that he
devoted his entire life to the description
and articulation of its beauty, preferring the
“bright tints of nature” to “the dingy high-art colors.” Indeed, it was a love of beauty
before all sense of function that led him to
hunt for a possible explanation for all he
perceived. His life’s work was to discover
the source and mechanism behind all
those “endless forms most beautiful” that
natural selection has made possible.
When you accept Darwin’s essentially
aesthetic motivation, it makes perfect
sense to examine how much influence his
ideas had on art, which was the subject of
Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural
Science and the Visual Arts, an exhibit at
the Yale Center for British Art last spring.
As I opened the glass doors to the mu-
seum, I was reminded of what the build-
ing’s architect, Louis Kahn, had said when
asked by the university what this com-
mission was going to be like when it was
finished. “It will be,” he replied, “like a
moth approaching a flame.” It is indeed a
beautiful building, all about the boundary
between interior and exterior, and the pre-
cise definitions of dark and light.
