1. Darwin and the Narrative of Human Origins

2. Effect Not about direct authorial influence
But the operation of a radical new narrative of human origins and story of human development upon cultural consciousness (and unconsciousness) the evidence of which we can see in a range of cultural products and by-products of the human imagination in the late 19th century and early 20th.
Perhaps the greatest “effect” of Darwin is Modernism itself, the
Great experimental period in western art from
Effect, After-effect, Side-effect

3. Perspective Major, seismic shift in perspective
Exampled in Cézanne, where physical perspective no longer obtains; upheaval in the basic principles of the world.
“Copernican” in scope

4. Paul Cézanne, Bibemus Quarry, 1895

5. Gaugin’s Questions
Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? 1897

6. Gaugin’s Questions
Where does humanity come from? What is humanity? How does humanity proceed?

7. Where does humanity come from?
A more remote origin in an expanding recessive (geological) timeline.
A look further back to a more anterior origin.
The myth of Victorian progress punctuated as a reverse story of regress.
A fresh and startling glimpse into the animal/bestial origins of humanity. We come from animals.

8. What is humanity?
Not advanced but “Primitive,” Savage, Disgusting; not singled out and superior to animals but continuous with them.
Darwin, Descent of Man (1871): “There can hardly be a doubt that we are descended from barbarians.”
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899); animal drives, the irrational

9. Kurtz

10. Edvard Munch, Scream (1893)

12. Pablo Picasso, Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon (1907)

13. Man Ray, Noire et Blanche (1926)

14. What is humanity? A function of natural laws, processes, mechanisms.
Reduction to physiology and materiality.
Human consciouness a development of the function of animals; natural mechanisms.
Not the nature of the Romantic English landscape

15. Romantic Nature

16. Victorian Nature
“nature red in tooth and claw” Tennyson

17. What is humanity?
Constant battle for survival; survival replaces purpose
Not fully formed by God but cobbled together by accident

18. Man (Woman) not fully formed
Picasso, Head of a Woman (1936)

19. What is humanity? Man/Woman in Process
Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase (1912)

20. Where are we going?
A creature looking before and after into an infinite unfolding of time with an acute sense of loneliness, alienation: no guide
Anxiety, ennui, despair, absurdity, accident
Purposeless proc ess? Loss of human agency? Waiting?
“The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come.” Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Becket, Waiting for Godot