New Haven Independent

Besides us, what do evolution’s monsters look like?

Darwin’s theories are either not actually a subject of art at all, or only too obvious a one.

But hidden among the ponderous, if timely, displays of “Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science, and the Visual Arts” at the Yale Center for British Art until May 3, there is — as if inside a series of nesting boxes — a small, unsettling series of lithographs by the 19th century fabulist Odilon Redon. One of them is this cyclops, apparently jovial — though perhaps not completely trustworthy. There are a number of questionable smiles in the sequence — even in the visage of a monocular plant — as if a dismal laughter is the single clear omen that we have of the future.

Fictions evolve as well as biologies; such a pictorial catalog of imagined myths suggests that whatever darkness nature can produce, human invention can outdo it. And not only in art.