Author Description

With the increasing loss of biological diversity in this Sixth Age of Mass Extinction, it is timely to show that devolutionary paranoia is not new, but rather stretches back to the time of Charles Darwin. It is also an opportune moment to show how human-driven extinction, as designated by the term, Anthropocene, has long been acknowledged. The halcyon days of European industrial progress, colonial expansion and scientific revolution trumpeted from the Great Exhibition of 1851 until the Dresden International Hygiene Exhibition of 1930 were constantly marred by fears of rampant degeneration, depopulation, national decline, environmental devastation and racial extinction. This is demonstrated by the discourses of catastrophism charted in this book that percolated across Europe in response to the theories of Darwin and Jean Baptiste Lamarck, as well as Marcellin Berthelot, Camille Flammarion, Ernst Haeckel, Louis Landouzy, FÃ(c)lix Le Dantec, Cesare Lombroso, Thomas Huxley, BÃ(c)nÃ(c)dite-Augustin Morel, Louis Pasteur, Ã0/00lisÃ(c)e Reclus, Rudolf Steiner and Wilhelm Wundt, among others. This book presents pioneering explorations of the interrelationship between these discourses and modern visual cultures and the ways in which the â oepicturing of evolution and extinctionâ by artists as diverse as Roger Broders, Albert Besnard, Fernand Cormon, HÃ(c)lène Dufau, Ã0/00mile GallÃ(c), FrantiÅ¡ek Kupka, Pablo Picasso, Carles Mani y Roig, Sophie Taeuber and Vasilii Vatagin betrayed anxieties subliminally festering over degeneration alongside latent hopes of regeneration. Following Darwinâ (TM)s concept of evolution as Janus-faced, the dialectical interplay of evolution and extinction and degeneration and regeneration is explored in modern visual cultures in Australia, America, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Spain and Switzerland at significant spatio-temporal junctures between 1860 and 1930. By unravelling the â oepicturingâ of the dread of alcoholism, cholera, dysentery