1.5 BOOKS MH AB


EXHIBITION

Changing expressions
Laura Spinney
From his early forties, the German artist Lovis 
Corinth developed a habit of painting a self-
portrait every year, just before his birthday. 
In 1911, at the age of 52, he painted himself 
in classical style, as a knight in armour. A year 
later, he portrayed himself as Samson blinded, 
a picture of agony in chains and a loincloth. In 
between, the artist had suffered a stroke in the 
right hemisphere of his brain.

Corinth’s style evolved so dramatically over 
his career, from naturalism to impressionism to 
expressionism, that he defies classification and 
is often considered an outsider. Art historians 
and neurologists debate whether the neuro-
logical damage he sustained drove him to be 
unconventional, or whether it was incidental 
to his artistic development.

Once the most fashionable portrait painter 
in Berlin, Corinth tired of the city after expe-
riencing his stroke and turned to rural land-
scapes. Like the impressionists, he revisited 
the same spot — his beloved Walchensee in 
southern Germany — and painted it at differ-
ent times of the day and year. In the last decade 
of his life, his preferred medium was drypoint, 

a kind of printmaking, and his style became 
more sensitive and expressive.

One theme throughout his work is a fascina-
tion for flesh and the body. His interest in the 
visceral took him to places other painters feared 
to go, such as the slaughterhouse. But whereas 
his early paintings celebrated nudity in biblical 
scenes, his later ones dwelt on more morbid 
aspects, including the skeleton and death. The 
earlier works were subversive takes on the old 
masters, but still naturalistic; the later ones, with 
their violent brushstrokes and free use of pri-
mary colours, were much more expressive.

To resolve the issue of his evolving style, some 
scholars have turned to the unbroken record of 
the self-portraits. Corinth’s stroke left him with 
the inability to process visuospatial information 
in the left side of his visual field, but how long 
this deficiency lasted is itself a matter of dispute. 
It is striking that in the earlier self-portraits he 
tends to be turned towards the left; in the later 
ones, towards the right. In an oil painting from 
1925, he is also turned rightwards, but a mirror 
reflects his gaze back towards the left. Perhaps 
that was a final attempt at compensation — he 
didn’t live to see his next birthday. ■

Laura Spinney is a science writer based in London 
and Paris, and author of the novel The Quick.

Lovis Corinth (1858–1925): Between Impressionism 
and Expressionism is at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, 
until 22 June.

EXHIBITION

Etching the artist’s mind
Colin Martin
Artist Susan Aldworth’s interest in neuro-
science was triggered during an emergency 
cerebral angiogram in 1999, while observing 
her brain’s structure on a monitor. “You are 
looking inside your head while think-
ing, seeing, feeling; your brain is work-
ing while you are looking inside it,” she 
marvelled. 

In 2005, as artist-in-residence at the 
Royal London Hospital, UK, Aldworth 
sketched works on location in hospital 
clinics and collaborated with consultant 
neuroradiologist Paul Butler and neuro-
psychologist Paul Broks. 

Scribing the Soul is her personal explo-
ration of how matter becomes mind. 
Now on display in Oxford, UK, the exhi-
bition will move to galleries across the 
United Kingdom next month. 

In a series of prints entitled Brainscape, 
Aldworth chose etching as a medium for 
exploring cognition because, like neuro-
transmission, it uses chemical reactions. 
Delicate surface effects were created by 
drawing on metal plates with marker 
pens and then dipping the plates quickly 
in acid. Ghostly lines flicker across the 

Lovis Corinth’s Last Self-portrait may reflect 
stroke damage to his brain’s right side.

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surfaces of the etchings, printed from the blue-
inked plates. Her fast etching process is a meta-
phor for rapidly firing cerebral neurons, and 
the resulting cognitive ‘blueprints’ capture the 
nanoseconds when “flesh thinks”. 

The surfaces of 20 etched plates, displayed 
as a wall-mounted grid, simultaneously absorb 
and reflect light, alternately evoking dull and 
scintillating thoughts. In two kaleidoscopic 
films, images of Aldworth’s brain obtained 
during a functional magnetic resonance imag-
ing scan are incorporated as a sequence of 
rapidly changing frames.

Aldworth’s latest series of etchings, The Self 
is a Shadow Puppet, dramatizes the convoluted 

topography of the brain, its neural net-
work and blood vessels. In one, a pair 
of ghostly hands reaches out of the dark 
background towards a disembodied 
brain, straining to touch its intangible, 
mysterious consciousness. 

In his introduction to the exhibition, 
Broks makes the argument that our 
understanding of consciousness bene-
fits from artists and scientists look-
ing at it collaboratively. “The self is a 
shadow puppet shaped by the firings 
of a hundred billion brain cells,” he 
writes. “These are conceptual conun-
drums. Intract able to current science, 
they call for an artistic response.” ■
Colin Martin is a writer based in London.

Scribing the Soul runs at Science Oxford, 
Oxford, UK, until 23 May; at Peninsula Arts 
in Plymouth, UK, from 7 June to 18 July; and 
at the Transition Gallery in London from 26 
July to 17 August.Cerebral art: Susan Aldworth’s Between a Thing and a Thought.

36

NATURE|Vol 453|1 May 2008B O O K S  &  A RT S


	Etching the artist's mind
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