A Deep Dive Into the Brain, Drawn in Exquisite Detail
It’s not often that you look at an exhibition with the help of the very apparatus that is its subject. But so it is with “The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal” at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University, one of the most unusual, ravishing exhibitions of the season.
It presents 80 notebook renderings in shifting combinations of ink and pencil by the Spanish neuroanatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934) that are seen as among the world’s greatest scientific illustrations. Together they describe a fantastic netherworld of f loating forms, linear networks, bristling nodes and torrential energies. They posit the thing between your ears as an immense cosmic universe. That the images are also undeniable as art only adds to the complexity of the experience.
Cajal is considered the father of modern neuroscience, as important in his field as Charles Darwin or Louis Pasteur are in theirs (though relatively unknown outside of it). His discoveries, made during the last dozen years of the 19th century, concern the way neurons, the building blocks of the brain, spinal cord and nervous system, communicate with one another.
His theory — immediately accepted by most, but not strictly proved until the 1950s — was that neurons are in touch without touching. They communicate across i nfinitesimal gaps known as synaptic clefts. Through a chemical and electrical transmission, the single- stemmed axon of one neuron talks to the branched root- like dendrite of another.
This process of synaptic messaging between unconnected cells came to be called the Neuron Doctrine, and in 1906, it earned Cajal the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He shared it with the Italian histologist Camillo Golgi, who had devised a new method of staining tissue that singled out individual cells under the microscope instead of presenting tangled illegible masses. An irony of the joint prize (for revealing the structure of the nervous system) is that Golgi remained unconvinced by the Neuron Doctrine and true to reticular theory, which saw neurons as physically connected.
In his research, Cajal’s two tools were the most powerful microscope he could find and one of the oldest art techniques known to mankind: drawing, for which he had great talent. Looking through the lens he saw with such acuity and drew so precisely freehand that some of his renderings still appear in textbooks. And yet he also drew with such delicacy and vivacity that his drawings stand on their own as wonders of graphic expression, both mysterious and familiar.
The drawings are fairly hardnosed fact if you know your science. If you don’t they are deep pools of suggestive motifs into which the imagination can dive. Their lines, forms and various textures of stippling, dashes and faint pencil circles would be the envy of any modern artist. That they connect with Surrealist drawing, biomorphic abstraction and exquisite doodling is only the half of it.
These small works evoke enough things you already know — landscape, weather systems, trees, marine life — that they bring you back around to reality, implying the multiple purposes of certain natural structures.
The drawings will elicit stupefied awe from art enthusiasts, who use their brains without knowing how they work, and excited chatter from visiting neuroscience types.