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A central challenge for science in the twenty-first century is to understand the human mind in biological terms. The possibility of meeting that challenge opened up in the late twentieth century, when cognitive psychology, the science of mind, merged with neuroscience, the science of the brain, to give rise to a new, biological science of mind. This new science of mind is important not only because it provides a deeper understanding of what makes us who we are, but also because it makes possible meaningful dialogues between brain science and other areas of knowledge.
In this essay I focus on one small component of this challenge: how the new science of mind has begun to engage with figurative art (Kandel, 2012). In my life as a scientist, I have benefited from taking a reductionist approach to biological questions. I explore a large scientific problem that interests me—namely, memory storage—by focusing initially on the simplest example of the problem and delving deeply into it. I take the same approach here, limiting my discussion to one particular cultural period, modernism in Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century, and one particular art form, portraiture.
I focus on Vienna 1900 because the major modernist painters of that time and place can be explored in depth. There are only three of them—Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele—yet they are important in the history of art both collectively and individually. As a group, the Viennese modernists sought to depict the unconscious, instinctual strivings of the people whom they painted, yet each artist developed a distinctive way of depicting his subjects through facial expressions and hand and body gestures.