A Bridge between Science and Art? The Artistic Reception of On Growth and Form in Interwar Britain, c. 1930–42

Abstract

Taking Herbert Read’s 1942 review of the second edition of On Growth and Form as its starting point, this article explores the artistic response to the work of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson during the 1930s and early 1940s through the frame of the culture of popular science and the powerful current of interest that artists directed towards science at the time. The role of Thomson’s work as a bridge between natural science and art, occupying the middle ground between poetry, philosophy and science, is described. Its creative use-value to Modernist artists as a pioneering work of morphology is discussed.