Books offered by JF Ptak Science Books

A Child’s Image of the 15th President as General during the Seminole Wars, Florida

A Child’s Image of the 15^th President as General during the Seminole Wars, Florida

Graphite on paper, being a very naïve  and lovely drawing of Zachary Taylor.  6x 8 inches.  $450

Zachary Taylor was born at Montebello, Orange County, Va., on Nov. 24, 1784. Embarking on a military career in 1808, Taylor fought in the War of 1812, the Black Hawk War, and the Seminole War, meanwhile holding garrison jobs on the frontier or desk jobs in Washington. A brigadier general as a result of his victory over the Seminoles at Lake Okeechobee (1837), Taylor held a succession of Southwestern commands and in 1846 established a base on the Rio Grande, where his forces engaged in hostilities that precipitated the war with Mexico. He captured Monterrey in Sept. 1846 and, disregarding Polk's orders to stay on the defensive, defeated Santa Anna at Buena Vista in Feb. 1847, ending the war in the northern provinces.

Though T aylor had never cast a vote for president, his party affiliations were Whiggish and his availability was increased by his difficulties with Polk. He was elected president over the Democrat Lewis Cass. During the revival of the slavery controversy, which was to result in the Compromise of 1850, Taylor began to take an increasingly firm stand against appeasing the South; but he died in Washington on July 9, 1850, during the fight over the Compromise. He married Margaret Mackall Smith in 1810. His bluff and simple soldierly qualities won him the name Old Rough and Ready.

A Note on Teaching Math, Unexpected Art, and Picturing Things Differently

ITEMS:

(1)  Henry Vuibert.  Les Anaglyphes Geometriques.  Paris, Librairie Vuibert, 4th edition, ca. 1935? 32pp.  Original printed wrappers.  Includes red/cyan paper viewing glasses.  Very good copy.  $75

(2) Major G. Mackinlay.  Realistic Arithmetic,  for Teaching Children the Elements of Arithmetic by Means of Special Blocks London, "printed at the Boys' Home", 1900.  4.5x3 inches, 24pp, 4 folding plates.  Seems to have been the author's copy, sent to the Library of Congress, a fair working copy, with corrections in pen by the author.  This seems to have been issued without a cover.  An odd, problematic copy of an odd, rare book.  $75

ref:  JF Ptak Science Books   Post  1427

Stereo viewing geometrical figures may or may not be useful--I find it a little off-putting, creating a slight dizzying effect, though I'm sure it helps others (particularly children?) see complex geometrical figures a little more easily., especially when it comes to crystalography images. Education was certainly what Henry Vuibert , the author of Les Anaglyphes Geometriques had in mind when he published the work in 1912.  He had a long history in mathematics education, having founded the firm that bears his name back in 1877, a publishing house specializing in school texts in the maths, physics and general sciences.  (We offer the book for purchase at out blog bookstore.)

Vuibert's book is a very early example of the use of the anaglyphe--examples of the use of the method go back to the 1850's, when d'Almeida used a version of the idea to punctuate lectures using a magic lantern; the (printing) process of the anaglyphe wasn't patented until the 1890's by L.D. DuHaron.  It does confuse me or remind me quite a bit of Oliver Byrne's beautiful monster The First Six Books of Euclid in which coloured diagrams and symbols are used instead of letters for the greater ease of readers... printed at the Chiswick Press by C. Whittingham for William Pickering in 1847.  The book is, well, unusual and probably not at all usefu1¹.  Bryne replaced all of the algebraic notation, identifying letters and almost all of the descriptive text with color and color codes, leaving Euclid mysterious, hidden, awkward, impervious, and, yes, beautiful². As a matter of opinion this work presages the cubists (and especially Piet Mondrian) by 60 years, and all by accident artwork. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are certainly much earlier works that tried to get at a fuller representation of geometrical objects, not the least of which was a 16th century Elements of Euclid in which the figures were cut-out paper, pasted into the book and attached to a string so that the reader could pull out the illustration and see it displayed in three dimensions. The elements of geometrie of the most auncient philosopher Euclide of Megara. Faithfully (now first translated into the Englishe toung…³, printed in London in 1570, was no doubt a great and exasperating labor of love, a complex "pop-up" book accomplished with sixteenth century technology.  (The photo below shows the Smithsonian Institution's copy.)

Of course there's the very old fashioned way of representing mathematical concepts, and that's with sticks and stones and blocks and such.  For visceral memory and practical applications, the idea is hard to beat, unless of course, you really beat it , which is difficult to do.  But to me that's just what Major G. Mackinlay did in his Realistic Arithmetic,  for Teaching Children the Elements of Arithmetic by Means of Special Blocks⁴, published in London in 1900--his ideas for the use of blocks was very sound and stable; his instructions (and in particular his illustrations) for what to do with the blocks was not.  I am reminded of inscrutable, badly translated and designed instructional manuals for tech stuff that need a manual for the manual. 

Here's one of the folding plates describing how to assemble the blocks:

Then there are other sorts of wooden (and etc.) three-dimensional models, such as the (600+) gorgeous geometric designs housed in the Institute Henri Poincare, transferred there from the laboratory of geometry of the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Paris in 1928⁵.  Most of these models were constructed around the time of vast change in mathematics and art (1900-1920), which means that many of them predate the revolutionary ascensions of  Cubism and non-representational art.

And as long as were at the point of unintentional and under-recogniozed epochal works, I think that there is a broad book that could be done on exactly this topic, calling into play such examples as Georgina Houghton, Victor Higo, Emily Vanderpoel, and many others. 

Georgina Houghton, for example, produced this non-representational painting in 1870 (or thereabouts):

 And Victor Hugo, from the 1860's

And Emily Vanderpoel (1900 or so):

In another, much earlier case of removing detail and adding abstraction for the sake of simplicity in representing an idea,  Erhard Schoen, in his Unnderweissung der proportzion und stellung der posssen liegent und dtehent, printed in Nurenberg  in 1538, presented these cubed figures (below).  He used simplified geometric form to stand in for the curvy humans, replacing them with proportional stacks of boxes which would more easily explain to the younger reader how to represent the human body in space and in proportion to other things. 

I think that these were monumentally combative images showing humans in a radical, previously unknown way, much like the moving-through-space-and-time photographs of the somewhat forgotten Etienne Marey, who in the 1870's created what was essentially the world's first "slow motion" device. One iteration of Marey's apparatus was basically a long series of ganged cameras recording a motion for a simple task at a given time frame and presented on a continuous strip of photographic paper, sort of like a motion picture with the camera speed set at three frames per second. The resulting images were phenomenal and showed people for the first time the exactness of all manners of simple motions--motions that no longer looked so "simple" once all of its aspects could be studied from captured photographic evidence.  Even the act of hopping over a small stool or bending to pick up a bucket of water were enormously revealing in a way like Robert Hooke's Micrographia displayed the great detail and complexity of the seemingly simple fly.  Perhaps the most famous of Marey's series of images was that of a galloping horse, which also for the first time revealed what exactly the horse's legs were doing and proving that almost every painter in the history of art represented the galloping horse incorrectly.  His series of photographs (as in this sample below) show a fairly close fit to the work of the futurists (like for example Duchamp) who would come into being after another four decades. 

  And Duchamp's Nude Descending:

 

I do want to make it clear that this is just a simple note, a thinking-out-loud piece on how attempts to visualize things differently for the sake of explanation or education can come "unintentionally" close to what would become epochal works.  More later.

Notes

1. Augustus De Morgan, mathematician and logician, wrote a very highly critical book A Budget of Paradoxes in which he describes hubbub, fakirs, frauds, perpetual motion machines, squaring the circle efforts, millstones and other useless books in the maths, and in here he sniffily dismisses Byrne's work. At best, to De Morgan, the Byrne book is "curious". But useless and curious, as I have seen many thousands of times, does not mean that it can't be attractive and beautiful, and the Byrne book is probably the leading candidate in the Bad & Beautiful category.

2. In his Victorian Book Design McLean calls the Byrne book "...one of the oddest and most beautiful books of the whole century...a decided complication of Euclid, but a triumph for Charles Whittingham [the printer]".

3.  This is also the first appearance of Euclid in English.  The full title: The Elements of geometrie of the most auncient philosopher Euclide of Megara faithfully (now first) translated into the Englishe toung by H. Billingsley, citizen of London; whereunto are annexed certaine scholies, annotations, and inventions, of the best mathematiciens, both of time past and in this our age; with a very fruitfull praeface made by M.I. Dee, specifying the chief mathematicall scieces, what they are, and whereunto commodious; where, also are disclosed certaine new secrets mathematicall and mechanicall, untill these our daies, greatly missed. London, Imprinted by I. Daye, 1570.

4.  From the Report of the Annual Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1906:

 

5.  From the IHP website:  "Most of the models  were created by Martin Schilling in Leipzig between 1900 and 1920 and  a few of them  (in wood)  were made between 1912 and 1915 by J. Caron, Professor of Descriptive Geometry in charge of  the "graphic work" course at the ENS at the beginning of the century (between 1912 and 1915)."

Also this:   "In the thirties, the surrealists, led by Max Ernst, were interested in these geometric objects. André Breton alludes to them in  "Crise de l'objet" , an article  in the magazine  Cahiers d'Art (May 1936, No. 1-2, p. 21-26.). Man Ray took photographs of the models, which where published in same issue. He would later use them to compose what he called  "Shakespearean Equations". Many artists, painters, architects and sculptors drew inspiration from them."

Spirit-Generated Art, 1871: Far-outside Outsider Art

ITEM:  Houghton, Georgiana. Catalogue of the Spirit Drawings in Water Colours, Exhibited at the New British Gallery, Old Bond Street. London: 1871.  32pp.  Bound in flexible cloth boards, with blind stamped decoration and a gilt stamped title on the front cover.  RARE.  No copies located in the OCLC.  This is the copy of the very eminent chemist and physicist William Crookes¹ (vacuum tube pioneer, "Crookes tube"), with "Miss Houghton's" presentation in her manuscript to him on the title page,dated 3 October 1871.     $500.00

ref:  JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1402

 This slim booklet,  Catalogue of the Spirit Drawings in Water Colours, Exhibited at the New British Gallery, Old Bond Street (London: 1871), offered descriptions of the work of  Georgiana Houghton (b. 1814), an artist who in some way communicated with the spirit world, and allowed her art to be guided by it. She writes in the very first paragraph of her catalog's introduction, "the execution of the Drawings my hand has been entirely guided by Spirits, no idea being formed in my own mind as to what was going to be produced..."  She explains that the spirits were definitely those of dead people, and after having heard of such possibilities of communication as early as 1859 set out to "obtain mediumship"  by holding hands with her mother at a small table for some months on end waiting for contact--which of course she says happened.  Sundays worked best, "as we should then be less disturbed by evil influences".   The spirits would communicate at first by table movement, then tapping,  and then through the alphabet by the use of a planchette. So it seems to me that given that she had abandoned her own input in the creative process (even though she had a history of formal art education or instruction), and that the inspiration she received seemed not to be her own, that Miss Houghton was an outsider-Outsider artist, pursuing the spoken artistic needs of others, and then providing her own interpretations of the forms and colors. (We offer the original copy of this catalog at our blog bookstore.)

It seemed that Miss Houghton was inspired by the spirit drawings of a Miss Wilkinson--it was then that she sought the artistic guidance of a dead artistic sister though without success, and then from a dead brother.  It was the brother who brought her into contact with dead Henry Lenny ("a deaf and dumb artist") who then guided her hands at first with the planchette, then with a pencil, and finally to watercolors. 

After ten years of her own spirit drawings, Miss Houghton produced for herself a four-month show at the New British Gallery on Old Bond Street, exhibiting 155 of her works, all exhibited in rented frames for the occasion.  Her reviews seem to have been very-light and  mixed at best,  and for all of her effort and trouble, she sold only one painting,  She did however produce a catalog of the exhibition, which was a great aid to the viewer as the interpretations of the meanings of the forms and colors that Miss Houghton used were written on the backs of the artworks, which were hidden from view by the frames--many of the paintings' meanings were annotated in the catalog.

Miss Stoughton was hardly alone in this field of representing what seems to have been a very actice after-life of the dearly departed, though it seems that not as many participated in her own brand of automatic representation than other methods of spirit communication.  She did appear at the beginning of what would become a significant culture of spiritualism, with spiritual manifestation, telepathic communication from one person to another and then to the dead, thought transference and  magnetisation.  The evidence of spiritual contact was produced on high levels, not the least of which were seances in which the dead appeared as floating ghosts filled with quiet or phantasmal groans and noises, sometimes luminous, sometimes leaving the medium's body as colored smoke, sometimes appearing as an electric spark, or an imprint on a photographic plate, or an aural shadow produced in iron filings, or an impression made in clay or other accepting materials².  They offered possibilities for hope and belief that are no less vigorous than our own today, save for their technological limitations.  (An interesting article, "Proof Positive, the Photomatic Body in fin-de-siecle Science, by Alessandro Violi, can be seen here.)

There is a very interesting article on Houghton and the exhibition by Rachel Oberter called  "Esoteric Art Confronting the Public Eye:  the Abstract Spirit Drawings of Georgiana Houghton" which was published in Victorian Studies 48.2 (2005) 221-232.  About the pre-Abstract abstract and proto-impressionist work, Oberter says:

"Given the lack of abstraction within Victorian visual culture, watercolors such as those painted by the artist Georgiana Houghton in the 1860s and 1870s seem shockingly out of place. In her work The Eye of God from 1862, we see a tangle of transparent straight, wavy, and spiraling lines flowing out of the left corner of the paper and up from the bottom edge of the page as white filaments float across the surface. No recognizable forms appear; all that is visible are lines and colors—yellow, sepia, and blue. There is an organic quality to the undulations, a sense of microscopic detail, and a feeling of being in a deep-sea world or otherwise mysterious place. The vagueness of the imagery contrasts with the specificity of the title, which evokes a dense underlying symbolism. Houghton attributed meaning to particular shapes, colors, and directions in her paintings. While her works were abstract, they remained representational."

"The most important tools for decoding these works are the explanations that Houghton wrote on the backs of the drawings [above] . These elaborate descriptions provide a key to the symbolism in the drawing, clarify the message of each work, and name the spirit who acted as Houghton's guide in the creative process. Houghton believed that these explanations were written by the spirits through her hands; they are automatic writings that complement her automatic drawings. The same spirit who inspired the drawing provided the interpretation on the back—the explanations, one could say, came directly from the source."

The catalog does give Biblical references for every one of the works, giving at least a location in the Bible for every artwork.  There are occasional (though sparse) longer descriptions of the work, though the great majority give Biblical citations for what each of the paintings represents. 

Also of interest is Ms. Oberter's description of the gallery event:

"...in 1871 she exhibited her works in a more formal venue: she organized an exhibition at the New British Gallery in Old Bond Street in London. The exhibition, entitled "Spirit Drawings in Water Colours," lasted for four months and consisted of 155 of Houghton's watercolors. She rented frames for the occasion and hung the watercolors against the walls of the gallery. This arrangement meant that the backs with the explanations would not have been visible. Yet it was still critical for Houghton that she convey this hidden information to her viewers. In her autobiography Houghton recalled: "The chief object aimed at in this Exhibition, was not so much to display the wondrous powers of the unseen intelligences, as to manifest unflinchingly to the world that true Spiritualism is inextricably bound up with the religion of the Sacred Scriptures" (Houghton, Evenings 2: 53). It was not enough for Houghton that the drawings serve as proof of communication between spirits and humans; it was also important that they convey the relationship between Spiritualism and Christian theology, particularly the insights that the spirits give about God and the Trinity."

 The artwork of Miss Houghton is an interesting blip in the history of Victorian art, and I'm not exactly sure what to say about it.  It certainly occurs during the first wave of Impressionism, and is wholly different from that new art form as well as the high Victorian fashion of the time; it also is entirely non-representational, an abstract art that precedes that revolutionary phase by about forty years.  Its a little puzzling to me, especially since Miss Houghton seems to have escaped virtually any sort of lasting review or critique.  But again Mrs. Stoughton is not alone in the non-representational art field apart from the automatic spirit manifestations--for example, in addition to an enormous literary output, Victor Hugo produced some 4,000 pieces of art, some of which are exceptional examples (to my mind) of non-representational art that came in a period decades before the Kandinsky and the rest.  Here is Hugo's "Evocation of an Island":

He was certainly outside the mainstream of Victorian art, and even well outside that of Impressionism. 

There was also Hilma of Klint (b. 1862), a woman who like Stoughton also represented the spirit world through her art, and who began painting in non-representational and abstract ways beginning in 1897/8, an example of which is below:

 
 

Miss Houghton went on to improve her representation of the spirit world through photography, a very wide selection of her work being available at the Keith De Lellis Gallery, here.

In the realm of extra-sensical belief, I'm not so sure that these brands of spiritualism would be too much different from any other belief in things that cannot be seen, or heard, or felt in any detectable way, a prayer by any other name.

Notes:

1. Our catalog was the property of William Crookes (with his bookplate, and with a signed inscription to him from "Miss Houghton")  who was an eminent British chemist and physicist and a pioneer in the field of vacuum technology (and remembered now mostly for the Crookes Tubes and his superior approach to experimentation).  He was interested in spiritualism from about the year 1869, pursuing it until his death in 1919.  He was hardly alone in his interests among highly-paced British intellectual elite:  Alfred Russell Wallace, Lord Rayleigh, Oliver Lodge and William James were all extremely interested in the spiritualism phenomenon.  Curious. 

2.

Imprints of ghost hands and faces produced by Eusapia Palladino, from Bozzano, Ipotesi spiritica, 1903, in C. Lombroso Ricerche..., 1909

 

 

 

Technical Drawing--Superb Shadowing, Shipboard Cannons, 1887

ITEM: Engraving, "Torpedo Boats for the Spanish Government", from The Engneer, 21 October 1887, 15x10 inches.  Fine condition.  $75

ref: JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

 

Horace may have said "Pulvis et umbra sumus" (“We are but dust and shadow")- and meant it, but the artist working here on this ship would definitely have replaced "dust" with "metal and wood".  The details above and below are two very small bits (each about a half-inch long or so)  from a 15-inch long engraving of a Spanish torpedo boat, and published in The Engineer on 21 October 1887.  The workmanship is superb and the sense of design to me is absolutely glorious--the entire image of the plan of the is ship is beautifully done, as are the shadows, which were added so far as I can tell for artistic delight. 

And another detail:

 

 

 

 

 

Technical Drawing--Superb Shadowing of Boilers, 1880

ITEM: Engraving of boilers for the Royal Mail  Steamshp Roslin Castle, published in The Engineer on 30 November 1880.  15x10 inches.  $75

ref:  JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This is another in a beginning series on superior draftsmanship in rendering technical, physical and biological objects.  The image--boilers for the Royal Mail  Steamshp Roslin Castle, published in The Engineer on 30 November 1880--is a very contained complexity, beautifully shadowed.  [The original is available for purchase at the blog bookstore.]

Which is a detail from this:

And from which also comes this detail:

Antique pre-Dada Ingredients of the Anatomy of the Senses

ITEMS as follows.

ref:  JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1362

Some of the strangest, occasionally least-of-their-time scientific illustration seems to come in the area of anatomical illustration--for me, anyway.  When taken out of context, some medical illustration looks positively modern, or post modern, as we can see with the following examples. 

The first image is a detail from a series of images by the Irish-born Quain brothers:  Jones Quain (1796-1865),  an anatomist and professor of Anatomy and Physiology at the University of London; and Richard Quain (1800-1887), professor of anatomy in 1832 at the University of London, then surgeon at North London Hospital, and president of the Royal College of Surgeons. The illustrations are from a later and smaller printing of their beautiful 1844 work The Anatomy of the Arteries of the Human Body, with its Applications to Pathology and Operative Surgery, in Lithographic Drawings with Practical Commentaries.  Taken out of context, removed 80 years or so, taken to Germany, and they might be bits and pieces (or entire works for that matter) of a Dadaist exhibition in Berlin in 1925. 

The full image of the image above is from:

TASTE

[Quain Brothers anatomy, London, ca. 1850, 12x9 inches.  $65.00]

SIGHT

[Quain Brothers anatomy, London, ca. 1850, 12x9 inches.  $65.00]

[Quain Brothers anatomy, London, ca. 1850, 12x9 inches.  $65.00]

And this beautiful detail:

[Source unknown, printed ca. 1870, $75.00]

SOUND

[Quain Brothers anatomy, London, ca. 1850, 12x9 inches.  $65.00]

 

TOUCH

This remarkable cross-section of the fingertip.

Which is a detail from:

[Source unknown, printed ca. 1870, $45.00]

SMELL

[Quain Brothers anatomy, London, ca. 1850, 12x9 inches.  $65.00]

HEARING

[Quain Brothers anatomy, London, ca. 1850, 12x9 inches.  $65.00]

An X-Ray of Cubism? Jouffret and Visualizing the Fourth Dimension, 1903 and 1906.

ITEMS:

1. Jouffret, E.  Traite Elementaire de Geometrie a Quartre Dimensions et Introduction a la Geometrie a n-Dimensions. Paris:  Gauthier-Villars,  1903.  1st edition.  Cloth.  Fine condition.  Scarce! 215pp.  (Book ID 8882) Sold.

2.  Jouffret. Melanges de Geometrie a Quatre Dimensions.   220pp. Paris:  Gauthier-Villars,  1906.  1st edition.  Cloth  Fine condition.  Perhaps one of the most classic works of the late 19th and early 20th c on imaging the fourth dimension--certainly well known to the Cubists and Futurists, I'm certain that it sparked any number of ideas in the artworld. Scarce!   (Book ID 9161 Sold.

Ref: JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1361

Is this an X-Ray of Cubism?

Emile Jouffret brought an amazing and lovely pair of books to the mathematical dining table, both coming at about the mid-point of a period of perhaps the most sweeping multdisciplinary revolutions in human history.  Published in 1903¹ and 1906² they both may have had an impact as a visulaization tool for the newest movement in art since the creation of Impressionism (1850's-1870's): Braque and Picasso's  Cubism. When you compare the illustrations in the Jouffret books you cannot help but to see a connection to the work of (the morally-lonely) Picasso (and especially in his 1910 portrait of the movement-molding art dealer Ambroise Vollard, below). Georges Braque and the that the two would make in 1906, the first year of the Cubist movement. 

Jouffret's 1903 book was hardly the first on the topic, though it may be the first of the major, book-length treatments of the topic, as well as the most  heavily illustrated.  Thinking on the fourth dimension goes back as far as Kant, at least, and the real work begins in the first half of the 19th century.

The first major³ work arrives with Hermann Grassmann's "Die Lineale Ausdehnungdlehre" (Theory of Linear Extensions) in 1844 (and the subsequent translations of the work as well as original work by Arthur Cayley); followed by Ludwig Shclafli (1814-1895) "Theorie der vier flachen...." (Theory of Continuous Manifolds, 1852 but not published until 1906), Riemann's 1854 speech (which was not published until 1867 and which appeared translated by William Kingdom Clifford in Nature in 1873, G.F. Rodwells "On Space of Four Dimensions" (Nature, May 1873),  Dodgson/Carroll's  Through the Looking Glass (1872) deep references, Zollner "On Space of Four Dimensions" 

(April 1878 and subsequent publications, and who is referenced in Kandinsky's [difficult -to-me On the Spiritual in Art of 1912), W.I. Stringham (1847-1909) "Regular Figures in n-Dimensional Space" (American Journal of Mathematics, 1880), and E.A. Hamilton Gordon, "Fourth Dimension", April 1887, to name some of the major figures.  And then of course comes Edwin Abbott's Flatland, a Romance of Many Dimensions, by a Square (1884) and Charles Howard Hinton, who published a number of different works beginning in 1880 ("What is the Fourth Dimension?", 1880 plus Scientific Romances 1884, and The Fourth Dimension, 1904) and lasting through the turn of the century.  There is also H.G. Wells, whose The Time Machine began to appear in parts as early as  1894, though it did appear in the same issue of the  Science Schools Journal as the Hamilton Gordon article, in April 1887, as the "Chronic Argonauts"). Wells' also approaches the fourth dimension in "The Plattner Story", in 1896 and The Invisible Man in 1897. Other literary contemporaries of Wells who used the fourth dimension in their work include Oscar Wilde ("The Canterville Ghost", 1891), George Macdonald (Lilith, 1895), and Joseph Conrad and Ford Maddox Hueffer The Inheritors, (1901)--the most convincing and scientific of all of these literary efforts though lies with Wells. From about this point on--from the time that Jouffret enters the scene in 1903--the fourth dimension has become part of the culture, and a popular culture at that...especially after the Cubists begin their assault on visual representation in about  1906.

The Jouffret books are beautiful, and very interesting--they would have been better served with a bibliography, which would have been very nice to have--that said, Jouffret does have a fair number of footnotes to earlier work, so it is not as though his work is without attribution.  But it is a very interesting adventure. (Just a note--the fourth dimension and non-Euclidean geometries would get their first bibliography in D.M.Y. Sommerville's classic  Bibliography of Non-Euclidean Geometry in 1911, which is a must-have for all of those interested in this topic...it is massively packed with all manner of obscuriana.  It is not, unfortunately, annotated.)

1. Jouffret, E.  Traite Elementaire de Geometrie a Quartre Dimensions et Introduction a la Geometrie a n-Dimensions. 

2.  Jouffret. Melanges de Geometrie a Quatre Dimensions.  Paris, Gauthier-Villars, 1906.  220pp.

3. Most of the data in this long and winding sentence has been culled from Linda Dalrymple Henderson's terrific The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, Princeton, 1983--most of my references come from the first 45 pages or so of her book, which is the Bible of all modern works on the fourth dimension/math/physics/art.

Reverse Autopsies of Stick Women--Blank and Empty Art Anatomy, 1941

ITEM: A Dynamic Home Study Course in Fashion, Drawing and Dress Design, Series One.  American Hme Studies, Washington D.C, 1941.  11x8 inches, 54pp.  Printed wrappers. FIne condition.  Scarce.  $45

ref:  JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1304

Part of our Blank, Missing and Empty series.

Coming on the heels of my posts of autopsies of snowmen and donuts comes this semi-remarkable thing, published by  American Home Studies (of 1700 Eye Street, NW, Washington D.C.¹), displaying very restricted instructions on anatomy for art students.  The drawings really work better in reverse, I think, because you really can't get to the final product from the illustrated series in its how-to sequencing unless you already were finished.

What happens throughout this pamphlet is what we see below--draw a circle, then divide it by drawing lines over imaginary bones, pop in some eyes and lips, and then fill in the rest.  Not too very helpful.  This is especially so when we look at the image above, which the student was supposed to simply cover with clothing after having added the head.  If this was an animated figure, I think I  would find it disturbingly creepy.

Things become clear by the time you reach the end of the pamphlet, when you are told that you can detach any page from the work and send it to the D.C. address for correction and advice, for a dollar a page.  That's when the real education occurs. (Many others have done this--the two guys responsible for creating Superman started out selling their services in just this how-to way.)

 

 

But I guess as a sort-of artist one would need to have something else going on for themselves so far as business goes, because its painfully clear that the maker of this pamphlet had special but very limited talent. I think that the faces given to these women are drawn by someone who does not like them, given their emotional range and all:  peevish, dull, bored, haughty, disinterested and, well, dead. 

Notes

1.  The building at 1700 I is gone now, replaced by another building of the many nameless buildings that create the corridors of I and K streets.  1700 I is basically right across the street from Farragut Square, and only a few blocks from Lafayette, which is across the street from the White House. Nice location.