Darwin and Art

Today, The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge opened a "landmark" exhibition: Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts (title link). I hope you're not becoming bored with all the Darwin celebrations this year to mark the 200th anniversary of his birth, because this show could be the best so far, created in association with the Yale Center for British Art. It explores the impact Darwin had on the 19th Century art world. BBC News has posted a video on the exhibition (CLICK). Switch on the captions and turn off the sound to silence the inappropriate music and trite feminist voiceovers by the curators. They fail to mention that naturalists in Darwin's day needed to be artists too, in order to illustrate their findings. They ignore the boon that Darwin's Theory of Evolution gave to cartoonists. And they totally ignore the impact that Darwin's concept of natural selection had on that pathetic would-be artist with the daft moustache: Adolf Hitler. The brutal notion of purifying the master race by culling degenerates was a perversion of Darwin's theories. From paintings of Stone Age humans to Nazi propaganda, Darwin's influence on art was profound. By limiting itself to the 19th Century, this exhibition doesn't tell the full story, but it's a start.