By MICHAEL CANNEY

Curator, Passmore Edwards Art Gallery, Newlyn, Cornwall

From “Discovery”, December 1959, pages 518-9. The article focuses on the work of
John Tunnard, who was living and painting in Penwith at the time.

The impact of science on mankind during the 20th century has been unlike anything in history. Man has learnt the secret of controlling his environment and has surrounded himself with tools, machines, buildings, means of transport, and ever-increasing sources of power which have at once eased his daily life beyond the wildest dreams of his forefathers and immensely extended his horizon. He has also created a number of new visual art media like photography, cinematography, and television. But as yet these seem to have attracted few men of genius, the majority of artists preferring to work in their traditional media of paint and sculpture. Only the cinema, in its brief and somewhat ephemeral existence, has attracted men like D. W. Griffith,
S. M. Eisenstein, Fritz Lang, Karl Dreyer, Robert Flaherty, Cavalcanti, and Pare Lorentz. Their work has already passed the test of time, and may well be admired by future generations as truly artistic creations made possible by scientific research. But like painters and sculptors, these great film directors and producers have only on the rarest of occasions chosen their subjects from the field of science. Equally rare is the use by modern sculptors of new materials, be they metals or plastics; although one might justifiably argue that transparency and lightness could give to sculpture a new look and almost a new dimension. The greatest structures the world has seen so far have been built by engineers during the last fifty years. Telescopes have opened the infinite vistas of the universe, and through the microscope a second, no less exciting, universe has been revealed to the eye. Have all these achievements left the artist unmoved and uninspired? THE EDITOR.

The solid and stable world of pre-atomic physics has disappeared, and in its place the revelations of the nature of the atom have undermined the artist's confidence in surface appearances. Everything that he took for granted has been questioned, analysed, and re-assessed; even his concepts of time and space have been radically transformed. The representation of objects in space upon a plane surface has been the special study of the painter for the last eight hundred years, and he cannot close his eyes to new discoveries in a field which so intimately concerns him.

During the first and second decades of this century the Cubists were particularly susceptible to the zeitgeist, for they were unconsciously influenced by the scientific discoveries and philosophy of that period. They rejected the concept of space as mere "nothingness", and made it positive, by modelling it and giving it some sort of density and volume; in fact, the positions of the spaces and forms in their pictures are frequently ambiguous. Other features of Cubism include the combination of a number of different aspects of the same object, three views of a table being regarded as nearer to the essence of "table" than one, and this superimposition of images may also, of course, have had some connexion with the early days of the cinema.

Moreover, this multiple viewpoint introduced the time factor into painting, for the images were observed at different periods in time. It is not altogether impossible that they were influenced, in their painting of transparent forms, by the scientific discovery that objects were not solid any longer in the accepted sense. The exact and razor-like edges of their forms is in direct contrast to the subtle shading and nuances that occur at the edges of objects in earlier painting. This precision of form had its counterpart in the emphasis which was being placed upon accuracy of measurement and observation in science and technology. One may assume that the artists were aware of the general outline and trends in science at that time, and without any conscious study of it they have produced an art which we can now see was representative of the period in which they were living.

PROPER AND SIGNIFICANT RELATIONSHIP

The aesthetic considerations which must be taken into account in painting and sculpture make it impossible to follow all the intricate processes of thought and feeling which go towards making up the final work of art. All that we know is that the artist is open to innumerable influences and, like other men, is susceptible to current philosophies, the advances of science, and the climate of life about him. His response is a sensual. one, and not in any way coldly calculating. There is no indication, for example, that a painter such as Piet Mondrian used the "Golden Mean" or other mathematical devices with any regularity, to determine the position of the lines in his grid-like pictures. There are signs, however, that artists who use mathematical formulae of this kind produce the most arid and uninspired works. The new forms which science presents to us are absorbed by the artist, and they sink into the subconscious alongside the apple and the nude, until they finally emerge upon the canvas, when the proper and significant relationship between them has been found, and a new image has crystallised.

An artist whose work in this connexion has been of great interest is John Tunnard, and his paintings have commended themselves in particular to scientists and engineers during the last thirty years. An examination of his work might incline the spectator to think that his interests ranged over the strange "Wellsian" machines and structures which litter the contemporary landscape, and can be found in the factory or the laboratory. But this artist has in fact devoted his life, when not painting, to the study of natural science – from the collection of small insects to the study of the habits of wild fowl and the creatures of the countryside and seashore. He has discovered that there are many similarities between these things and modern machinery; it is not entirely fortuitous that the tail of an invertebrate such as the dragonfly should be similar in construction to the fuselage of an aircraft, and one can find many other parallels between nature and engineering.

John Tunnard has always insisted that he has no interest in modern technology and that it is a closed book to him; in, fact, he lives in a remote part of Cornwall in order to avoid seeing the disfigurementof the landscape by power stations and modern industry. Yet, quite intuitively, many structures that have now become familiar to us, such as the radio-telescope and radar antennae, have appeared in his pictures, sometimes before their erection or invention. In one particular case, a scientist, with some surprise, recognised in one of Tunnard's paintings the general atmosphere of a problem on which he had been working. In another case, a television engineer was moved to remark that one of Tunnard's paintings seemed to sum up everything that he knew, and it was difficult to convince him that the artist was not also obsessed with television and radio circuits and the cathode ray tube. Perhaps an explanation lies in the fact that every age seems to have shapes which belong and to it and which therefore appear in its art. The very words rococo and baroque carry with them images of certain forms and shapes Iand the resemblances between the early biplanes and Cubist paintings of the same period are quite remarkable. Is it coincidental that the shapes seen in much of modern sculpture are similar to those found in the jet plane of today, or is the artist in this case following in. the wake of the aircraft designer? Both are concerned with producing a perfect form, in one case functional and in the other aesthetic, and yet how often the purely functional form is aesthetically satisfying as well. In the case of John Tunnard his shapes are eminently contemporary and this explains the appeal of his pictures to the scientist, engineer, and architect.

PSYCHOLOGY AND SPACE TRAVEL

The influence of Freud and Jung on the fine arts remains yet to be fully assessed and examined. Recently, in America and in this country, there have been some examples of nearly automatic paintining, and some of Tunnard's work falls into this category. There is great interest at present in the imagery that is created in this manner. These images, sometimes disturbing or erotic, may be the result of associated ideas, they may be archetypal forms, or they may be entirely new forms which are a synthesis of a wide range of experience undergone by the artist.

It may be that the arts are a more fruitful ground for study for the scientist than science is for the artist. Whether space travel will have any effect upon painting remains to be seen, but the vast distances in John Tunnard's paintings seem to herald the space age. The weightlessness of the space traveller might also be felt in Jackson Pollock's pictures, where forms with weight are absent, and the picture surface is merely the recipient of visible energy in the form of dynamic lines which seem to fly through space.

Generally speaking, however, science and technology cannot be said to have inspired the artist directly. Two exceptions are Henry Moore, whose string figures (see DISCOVERY, 1957, vol. 18, No.6, p. 249) were suggested by mathematical forms and shapes seen by the artist in the Science Museum, and Hans Erni, whose paintings have been stimulated by scientific and technological achievements. This month's cover is a splendid example of his work. Only Leonardo da Vinci combined a mastery of all known science with an ability to produce artistic masterpieces, and science has now become too specialised and too vast a subject for us ever to see his like again. If an artist lives in a scientific age and is sympathetic to scientific progress something of this will come through in his work, but there is no necessity for him to accept a scientific discipline, or to spend his life studying new forms revealed by the electron microscope.