DID ARTISTS DISCOVER CHAOS BEFORE SCIENTISTS?

Chaos was historically discovered with the Lorenz attractor in 1963. Several artworks, created before that date, by post-war artists such as Fontana, Crippa, Mathieu and Tobey, seem to anticipate forms and shapes typically shown by chaotic systems. In this paper, we juxtapose these masterpieces with some strange attractors of dynamical system theory in a timeline leading to the question whether artists discovered chaos before scientists.