D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form and the Concept of Dynamic Form in Postwar Avant-Garde Art Theory
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11936240 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Assimina Kaniari (Athens School of Fine Arts, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2013 |
| Volume | 38 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 63-73 |
| Publication date | 2013-03-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Interdisciplinary Science Reviews (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0308-0188 • E-ISSN: 1743-2790 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1179/0308018813z.00000000035 |
| OpenAlex | W2048470307 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 7 |
The impact is considered of D’Arcy Thompson’s notion of biological form as set out in On Growth and Form on postwar avant-garde experimental art practices associated with the Independent Group, Nigel Henderson’s photography, and László Moholy-Nagy’s post-Bauhaus art theory. How Thompson’s insistence on the importance of physical forces in shaping biological form, and of distortion as a component of symmetrical systems, influenced the writings and practices of these artists, is explored, linking abstraction to legacies concerned with materiality and technique encountered earlier in Constructivism. Henderson’s photograms and ‘stressed photography’ are shown to be directly inspired by Thompson’s conception of form as a diagram of forces, and attest to a novel understanding of rules of symmetry in abstract form that may be seen in the dynamic processes at play in complex natural phenomena. How Moholy-Nagy explored these notions theoretically is examined, for example in his definition of drawing in Vision in Motion, which cites Thompson directly as a source of inspiration
Abstraction · Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Avant garde · Epistemology · Materiality (auditing · Natural (archaeology · Photography · Visual arts · Advanced Theoretical and Applied Studies in Material Sciences and Geometry · Architecture and Computational Design · Art, Technology, and Culture · History · Philosophy
| Citations per year | 0.29 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2019 - 2022 (4) |
| Highly cited | No |