Whereas the face is critical to the expression of the emotion, the hands and body signal how a person is coping with emotion. [302]

Even a brief scan of the hardbound edition makes evident the ambitious scope Kandel brings to this project: the illustrations are a heady mix of art reproductions, diagrams & schematics, photo portraits, and clinical images (including neural scans); the Table of Contents, running to three pages, reveals a wide net bringing in artists & movements, cultural trends, psychological research and theorists, and specific topics in neurobiology; and the book closes with near-scholarly Endnotes and Index. Even so, I wasn't anticipating either the depth or breadth of the argument on offer. This is not only an essay on the expression of emotion in art; it is also how our brains process images, and from these images produce emotion, and thereby build a "survival mechanism" which proved key to human civilisation.

Kandel structures his argument methodically and deploys brief, clearly written chapters. Much ground is covered, both artistic influences and schools, scientific literature and experiments, but his discussion is unfailingly lucid. That level of detail, however, tends to leave the reader lost in the wood. Kandel's division of the book into five parts goes a long way to keeping the attentive reader on track; indeed, just reading the section heads orients the reader and hints at the interplay between Kandel's topics of interest. It also supports dipping into specific sections without having full recollection of all preceding chapters: while I intend to re-read the full text eventually, it's useful knowing I can also revisit specific sections and still find it instructive.

Part 1 - A PSYCHOANALYTIC PSYCHOLOGY AND ART OF UNCONSCIOUS EMOTION
Mind and visual arts

Part 2 - A COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY OF VISUAL PERCEPTION AND EMOTIONAL RESPONSE TO ART
Mind and visual process

Part 3 - BIOLOGY OF THE BEHOLDER'S VISUAL RESPONSE TO ART
Brain and visual arts

Part 4 - BIOLOGY OF THE BEHOLDER'S EMOTIONAL RESPONSE TO ART
Brain and visual process

Part 5 - AN EVOLVING DIALOGUE BETWEEN VISUAL ART AND SCIENCE
Brain and mind and vision, as a means of better understanding human experience

We know now that one of the reasons expressonist art appeals to us so strongly is that we have evolved a remarkably large, social brain. It contains extended representations of faces, hands, bodies, and bodily movement, and as a result we are hardwired to respond unconsciously as well as consciously to exaggerated depictions of these parts of the body and their movement. Moreover, the brain's mirror neuron system, theory-of-mind system, and biological modulators of emotion and empathy endow us with a great capacity for understanding other people's minds and emotions. [500]

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Key to Kandel's achievement are the concise yet detailed chapters on specific aspects of his argument, substituting multiple linked & focused essays for what might elsewise be a meandering and lengthy treatise.

Artists: Gustav Klimt - Oskar Kokoschka - Egon Schiele - Arthur Schnitzler - Franz Xaver Messerschmidt
Psychologists: Sigmund Freud
Medical / Neurobiologists: Carl von Rokitansky - Josef Skoda
Social Scientists / Humanists: Ernst Gombrich ( )

This book is about the biological aspects of our emotional response to art. In particular, to Viennese expressionist art of the early 20th century. Sounds complicated, but Kandel writes about it with such lucidity, it was easy to understand his thesis. I highly recommend it. ( )

The author clearly enjoyed himself immensely writing this. In this case I won't hold the brazen self-indulgence since I enjoyed it too. And I'm not even an art aficionado like the author. Initially I was disappointed when it went into so much detail about art history but I'm glad I stuck with it as it does so much more and I'm happy to learn some art background which otherwise I would never bring myself to read about. ( )

Part one is a review of some pornographic material from about 1900 from Vienna. Freud also figures prominently in Part 1. Part 2 and Part 3 can't leave that heritage behind. It's time to exercise the rule that it's okay to not read the whole thing. Based on the topic of this book, it is no wonder that the Viennese period of greatness collapsed. ( )

Well Eric Kandel has put together a really interesting book. Initially, I thought it was going to be a rather superficial critique of art. Then I thought it was all a bit too much about Vienna in 1900 being the centre of the cultural universe, and, in particular, the extraordinary contribution of the rather small Jewish population there. And when I did a bit of research on Eric Kandel himself, I found that he was born in Vienna and also Jewish. In some ways, this book is a hymn to the Jewish population of Vienna. In another biographical work Kandel says: "My parents genuinely loved Vienna, and in later years I learned from them why the city exerted a powerful hold on them and other Jews. My parents loved the dialect of Vienna, its cultural sophistication, and artistic values. “The greatest grim irony of all was the fierce attachment of so many Jews to a city that through the years demonstrated its deep-rooted hate for them,” wrote George Berkley, the American historian of Vienna and its Jews". In fact, I found myself wondering whilst reading this book, whether I was getting a full picture or was Kandel "cherry picking" from history and just focussing on the people that were important to his own history. In hindsight, I think he has "cherry picked" but manages to stick with his three chosen artists to illustrate all his points about Art and the brain.
A couple of other points about Kandel are: he is a Nobel Prize winner for physiology or Medicine in 2000. No mean feat.....it was for his work on memory storage in the brain and especially for his work using the Axons of sea slugs. And his first degree was actually in 19th and 20th century European history and literature. Finally, he was mentally burned by the Nazi take over in Vienna ...as he says (elsewhere).... "I cannot help but think that the experiences of my last year in Vienna helped to determine my later interests in the mind, in how people behave, the unpredictability of motivation, and the persistence of memory."
I first became interested in the working of the brain when I was still at high school...and read a book called: Memory: Facts and Fallacies" by Ian Hunter which was published in 1957 and I probably read it in about 1958 when I was 14. It was heavy going but, worse still.....when I had finished it I was left with a profound emptiness. As I recall they wrote a lot about alpha waves of the brain but in terms of understanding what was going on in the brain....there was a big blank.
Happily, 60 years later.....as Kandel's book points out ....a lot of progress has been made. And, interestingly the progress has not really been made by the philosophers or psychologists.....as far as I can tell....but it has been due to the new tools such as fMRi. I guess the next big breakthrough will come when we are able to trace the activity of individual axons though the brain...or are able to build working models with living axons.
But Kandel does a pretty good job, in my opinion, of explaining the functioning of the brain......the roles played by:
Perception
The conscious parts of the brain
The unconscious parts of the brain
Emotion
The interplay between the unconscious and the conscious
The role of emotion both conscious and unconscious
Lower level processing and higher level processing
The insights of psychologists....especially Freud.
The contribution of artists to psychology/perception/cognition/understanding emotion/visual processing
Intertwined throughout the narrative about the functioning of the brain, Kandel used the work of three artists to exemplify some of the ways the brain functions...especially at the emotional level. (Klimpt, Schiel and Kokoschka). So Kokoschka's portraits supposedly go beneath the surface appearance of the sitter to reveal their "true" psychological state. (OK maybe......but Kokoschaka probably painted a lot of landscapes and it's hard to look for psychological truths in these). Anyway, Kandel draws attention to the way that when we look at people we spend more time looking at eyes and mouths ...and hands too are really important. And he shows how Kokoschaka and Schiele have emphasised these aspects of their sitters. Kandel assumes that they really have psychological insight. (Maybe ....maybe not).
He has a great section on vision and another on emotion and another on creativity.
In his last section he concentrates on the links between the arts and science. I get the impression that he wants to be seen as both a fine scientist and someone with a profound appreciation and understanding of the arts. Certainly he has a good understanding of the three artists that he focusses on. And I can understand why he confines himself to portraits of people but I would have appreciated perhaps a slight diversion into other aspects of arts. (For example, what do people look for in landscapes or drawings of animals?).
I think I will go back to this book again. It's a bit too much to totally take-in in the one go. But, then, in 5 years time knowledge about the brain might have moved on a lot and one would be better off reading later work.....we will see.
Happy to give this one five stars. ( )