Technology and Culture

Art historian Ana Lamata Manuel offers an outstanding analysis of the echoes of X-rays in continental Europe’s artistic and literary practices of the early twentieth century. Although interaction between the history of science and technology and the history of literature and the arts is not new in the Spanish-speaking world, few works in Spanish have analyzed with such depth and richness the impact of radiology on the artistic avant-gardes.

Lamata shows how X-rays were linked to the epistemological and aesthetic model embraced by artists and writers working under the “super realist” banner. A closer look at the cultural context in which Roentgen’s discovery was embedded reveals X-rays alongside a whole set of scientific research and technological innovations: the gramophone, film, aviation, relativity theory, and so on. Radiology thus encapsulated the emergence of a new way of thinking about and representing reality, epitomizing the avant-garde desire to capture reality in depth.

The author starts by presenting a set of “radiological myths,” combining several socially constructed cultural hopes and anxieties surrounding Roentgen’s discoveries, with some scientific and pseudoscientific practices overlapping. Lamata traces the transfer of radiological technologies from hospitals to showrooms, exhibitions, popular newspapers, department stores, and households. Her aim is to show how these public perceptions of X-rays informed the artistic avant-gardes’ reflections. Indeed, she builds a convincing cultural history of X-rays based on a detailed analysis of diverse transnational sources, such as novels, the daily press, scientific popularization journals, graphic humor, and even the spiritualist press. The remaining chapters, presented as a “constellation of autonomous and interdependent scenes” (p. 15), focus on authors and artists such as: Guillaume Apollinaire (chapter 2), Pablo Picasso (chapter 3), Marcel Duchamp (chapter 4), Giorgio de Chirico (chapter 5), and Francis Picabia (chapter 6), while chapter 7 describes Italian Futurism and Russian Rayonism. Each chapter features a compilation of artwork and graphic material.

My concern, however, is that the author conveys the circulation, transfer, and appropriation of scientific theories and radiological technologies rather vaguely. This is especially true of chapters 2, 3, and 5, where X-rays seem to become a mere metaphor for explaining these artists’ “radioscopic gaze.” Chapter 2, for example, explores Apollinaire’s desire to see reality “radiologically” through what he defines as a “super realistic eye” (p. 73). Yet evidence on how X-rays influenced him rests on weak clues, such as his library containing dissertations on X-rays by Gérard Encausse and Charles Henry, and his friendships with Victor Goloubeff or Alfred Jarry. We might wonder about Lamata’s inclusion criteria, since Jarry, who explicitly incorporates X-rays by using scientific imagery in his texts (see note 29, p. 305), [End Page 975] appears only tangentially. By contrast, chapter 3 discusses how X-rays influenced Picasso’s work, although Lamata acknowledges his “scientific readings were rather scarce” (p. 122).

Much more convincing are chapters 4, 6, and 7, where Lamata insightfully analyses the artists’ experiments with X-rays and the aesthetic reflections they triggered. In chapter 4, the reader learns how a rich network of contacts, examinations, and engagement with popular physics nurtured Duchamp’s assimilation of his nude paintings with X-ray images. Artworks such as his Large Glass aimed to reflect reality by dividing the objects as in X-ray articles at the time. Finally, chapter 7, arguably the most compelling of the book, presents the Italian futurists’ desire to shape universal vibrations and advocate other explorations of reality. This chapter similarly explores Russian Rayonism, whose followers present the universe “as a web of electromagnetic radiations from which the painting should be the surface, registration and catalyst” (p. 271).

Although this is ostensibly a history of art—with lengthy discussions on artists’ aesthetic and philosophical views and no reference to current history of science and technology literature—it encourages us to move beyond our disciplinary boundaries and establish new dialogues. Lamata’s analytical depth and richness of detail will help...