Born of the sociocultural effervescence that swept through Europe in the years following the First World War, Surrealism represented a profound disillusionment towards the established intellectual order that it held responsible for the dehumanising and violent depths to which civilisation had so recently sunk. Decrying the inadequacy of postwar philosophies and politics to deal with the new, brutalised world of the interwar period, the Surrealists loudly championed a revolution of perception by replacing the certainties of prewar thought with the unpredictable discontinuities of non-Euclidean geometry, the base materialism of Georges Bataille and, most especially, the dark visions of the human psyche that emerged through Freudian psychoanalysis.

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Taking Herbert Read's 1942 review of the second edition of On Growth and Form as its starting point, this article explores the artistic response to the work of D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson during the 1930s and early 1940s through the frame of the culture of popular science and the powerful current of interest that artists directed towards science at the time. The role of Thomson's work as a bridge between natural science and art, occupying the middle ground between poetry, philosophy and science, is described. Its creative use-value to Modernist artists as a pioneering work of morphology is discussed.

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