These short seminars are intended as a venue for research students to
present and discuss interesting aspects of their work. The format
consists of a presentation of about thirty minutes, followed by about
twenty minutes for discussion.

The years 1880-1914 were a time of intense experimentation in the visual arts. Artists deliberately departed from a concept of resemblance at the basis of representation and proposed visual resolutions that verged on the conceptual. My research explores the interplay between artistic and scientific representations at the turn of the 20th century. I argue that science and technology acted as substantial challenges to the concept of resemblance in art and that the rhythm of scientific and technological discoveries between 1880 and 1914 paralleled a shift from a notion of similarity to one of homomorphism in the conceptualization of pictorial representation. Homomorphism denotes conceptual representations which dispense with a point-to-point correspondence between depicted objects and perceptual data.

Using four case studies – the photographer Alfred Stieglitz and the painters André Derain, Max Weber and Pablo Picasso – I propose that representative practice between 1880 and 1914 was strongly informed by experimental scientific practices and that the shift from figurative to conceptual representation in art was triggered by a more significant theoretical shift investing representation as a general philosophical notion. The aim of my study is thus to propose an original and systematic attempt to combine historical and philosophical accounts of artistic and scientific representations and lay the foundations for a philosophical history of representative practice.