How science changed the way artists understand reality Exploring the Invisible shows how modern art expresses the first secular, scientific worldview in human history. Now fully revised and expanded, this richly illustrated book describes two hundred years of scientific discoveries that inspired French Impressionist painters and Art Nouveau architects, as well as Surrealists in Europe, Latin America, and Japan. Lynn Gamwell describes how the microscope and telescope expanded the artist's vision into realms unseen by the naked eye. In the nineteenth century, a strange and exciting world came into focus, one of microorganisms in a drop of water and spiral nebulas in the night sky. The world is also filled with forces that are truly unobservable, known only indirectly by their effects—radio waves, X-rays, and sound-waves. Gamwell shows how artists developed the pivotal style of modernism—abstract, non-objective art—to symbolize these unseen worlds. Starting in Germany with Romanticism and ending with international contemporary art, she traces the development of the visual arts as an expression of the scientific worldview in which humankind is part of a natural web of dynamic forces without predetermined purpose or meaning. Gamwell reveals how artists give nature meaning by portraying it as mysterious, dangerous, or beautiful. With a foreword by Neil deGrasse Tyson and a wealth of stunning images, this expanded edition of Exploring the Invisible draws on the latest scholarship to provide a global perspective on the scientists and artists who explore life on Earth, human consciousness, and the space-time universe.

The Visible and the Invisible contains the unfinished manuscript and working notes of the book Merleau-Ponty was writing when he died. The text is devoted to a critical examination of Kantian, Husserlian, Bergsonian, and Sartrean method, followed by the extraordinary "The Intertwining--The Chiasm," that reveals the central pattern of Merleau-Ponty's own thought. The working notes for the book provide the reader with a truly exciting insight into the mind of the philosopher at work as he refines and develops new pivotal concepts.

How art makes visible what had been invisible—the effects of radiation, the lives of atomic bomb survivors, and the politics of the atomic age. The effects of radiation are invisible, but art can make it and its effects visible. Artwork created in response to the events of the nuclear era allow us to see them in a different way. In Invisible Colors, Gabrielle Decamous explores the atomic age from the perspective of the arts, investigating atomic-related art inspired by the work of Marie Curie, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the disaster at Fukushima, and other episodes in nuclear history. Decamous looks at the “Radium Literature” based on the work and life of Marie Curie; “A-Bomb literature” by Hibakusha (bomb survivor) artists from Nagasaki and Hiroshima; responses to the bombings by Western artists and writers; art from the irradiated landscapes of the Cold War—nuclear test sites and uranium mines, mainly in the Pacific and some African nations; and nuclear accidents in Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island. She finds that the artistic voices of the East are often drowned out by those of the West. Hibakusha art and Japanese photographs of the bombing are little known in the West and were censored; poetry from the Marshall Islands and Moruroa is also largely unknown; Western theatrical and cinematic works focus on heroic scientists, military men, and the atomic mushroom cloud rather than the aftermath of the bombings. Emphasizing art by artists who were present at these nuclear events—the “global Hibakusha”—rather than those reacting at a distance, Decamous puts Eastern and Western art in dialogue, analyzing the aesthetics and the ethics of nuclear representation.

In one of his sparkling aphorisms on the end of 'optical' art, Marcel Duchamp suggested that the title of an artwork was an 'invisible color'. John Welchman now offers the first critical history of how and why modern artworks receive their titles. He shows that titles were seldom produced and can rarely be understood outside of the institutional parameters that made them visible - exhibitions, criticism, catalogues, and even national politics.

Published on the occasion of a major exhibition opening at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, Inside the Visible presents a gendered reading of more than thirty women artists of vastly different background and experience. The work of important yet previously "invisible" figures is highlighted alongside the work of established artists to create a retheorized interpretation of the art of this century. Structured in terms of recurrent cycles over time, Inside the Visible focuses on three periods (the 1930s and 1940s, the 1960s and 1970s, and the 1990s) that anticipated a wave of political repression, nationalism, and xenophopia, often stimulating artistic production that redefined practice. Illustrated essays document each artist in the collection. In addition, four general essays trace the connections among the artists. These take up such issues as why artistic recognition eluded certain artists and why their work is only just becoming visible today. They also address overlapping themes such as gender and sexuality; the intersection of racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional identities; and the nature of the relationship between work and viewer.

This timely collection engages with representations of women and ageing in literature and visual culture. Acknowledging that cultural conceptions of ageing are constructed and challenged across a variety of media and genres, the editors bring together experts in literature and visual culture to foster a dialogue across disciplines. Exploring the process of ageing in its cultural reflections, refractions and reimaginings, the contributors to Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture analyse how artists, writers, directors and performers challenge, and in some cases reaffirm, cultural constructions of ageing women, as well as give voice to ageing women’s subjectivities. The book concludes with an afterword by Germaine Greer which suggests possible avenues for future research.

In The Flesh of Images, Mauro Carbone begins with the point that Merleau-Ponty's often misunderstood notion of "flesh" was another way to signify what he also called "Visibility." Considering vision as creative voyance, in the visionary sense of creating as a particular presence something which, as such, had not been present before, Carbone proposes original connections between Merleau-Ponty and Paul Gauguin, and articulates his own further development of the "new idea of light" that the French philosopher was beginning to elaborate at the time of his sudden death. Carbone connects these ideas to Merleau-Ponty's continuous interest in cinema—an interest that has been traditionally neglected or circumscribed. Focusing on Merleau-Ponty's later writings, including unpublished course notes and documents not yet available in English, Carbone demonstrates both that Merleau-Ponty's interest in film was sustained and philosophically crucial, and also that his thinking provides an important resource for illuminating our contemporary relationship to images, with profound implications for the future of philosophy and aesthetics. Building on his earlier work on Marcel Proust and considering ongoing developments in optical and media technologies, Carbone adds his own philosophical insight into understanding the visual today.

While the official history of planning as a defined profession celebrates the state and its traditions of city building and regional development, this collection of essays reveals a flip side. This scrutiny of the class, race, gender, ethnic, or other biased agendas previously hidden in planning histories points to the need for new planning paradigms for our multicultural cities of the future. Photos.