Essays on Art and Science

Seven essays in which a Nobel-winning neuroscientist applies brain science to how viewers perceive and feel about painting and sculpture.

Eric Kandel explains our emotional responses to art through unconscious processes of perception, memory and emotion. He starts from Vienna 1900 and the exchange between Christians and Jews that produced Viennese modernism. He returns to the beholder's share, the idea that a viewer completes an artwork. Other essays treat Chaim Soutine, the modern representation of women, portraiture, Cubism, sculpture against painting, and abstract against figurative art. Columbia University Press published the hardcover in March 2024.

Kandel shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his studies of learning and memory and is University Professor Emeritus at Columbia. His earlier books on art and the mind include The Age of Insight (2012) and Reductionism in Art and Brain Science (Columbia, 2016).