Ptak Science Books

The Visual Genetics of Color and an Unintentional Pre-Modernist Masterpiece

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1282--continued, & now with the Full Text book!

[Earlier in this blog, about 1200 posts ago, a million words ago, I wrote about an extraordinary book by an aesthetician named Emily Vanderpoel.  It is "extraordinary" in a narrower sense, and that "extraordinary" might not actually be positive for its original intent.  The extra-intent of the book, what has come out of it for me, was something that was unintentionally accomplished by the author.  The images that she used to illustrate her color theory ideas--the basis of which are not really comprehensible to me--turn out to be artwork in themselves, a found art, the artistry of the images taking over the original intention for the arrangement of their color.  I've found the book now at the Internet Archive in all of its glory, and downloaded only 150 times.  I'm still at a loss to know why this work hasn't received more attention

The idea of how we put parameters to something like the visual field is a gargantuan topic—it is something that architects and geometers and physicists and mathematicians (in general) have dealt with forever.

The full text is available HERE via Internet Archive.

  Mapmakers have perhaps the most visualized aspect of this on paper, performing the semi-miracle of translating three dimensions into two; physicists have a more difficult time, taking the opposite approach, sort of , and translating two or three dimensional space into x-number of dimensions.  Anatomists had a difficult time of their subject until relatively recently in human history, what with the sublime religious curfews on messy knowledge and all coming into play, poking around into the heart and such as though it was an affront to the sanctity of the creator (M Servetus’ ideas on the circulation of the blood via the heart, making the heart a tool and not the brain or some odd conjunction of creative divine power, cost him his life, burning slowly alive at the stake…how mysterious the whole world of RNA Genotype-Phenotype Mapping and such would seem to him if he could have a peek into the future/present from wherever he is.)

Color theory is old and pretty—as a matter of fact there is a very attractive gathering of color theory models (in black and white, though) displaying some two dozen or more color models from the last 400 years.  People like Della Porta (1593), our old friend and resident oddball polymath crank Kircher (1646), the smarter-than-you-could-imagine Newton (1660), Waller (1686), Lambert (1772), the wide ranging and again polymathic Goethe (1792), Herschel (1817, who also ushered in our understanding of the other light-sensitive shape spacing medium of photography in 1840), the semi-forgotten Chevreul (1835), the beautiful Maxwell (1857), Wundt (1874, the early experimental psychologist who also looked for spirits/spiritmus and ghosts), von Bezold (1878), Rood (1879), Munsell (1918) Kandinsky (1914 and not decipherable by me) and Klee (1924), and so on towards the present, all tried to analyze the prospects of color.

Not in this list is the very highly problematic Emily Vanderpoel, who in 1901 and 1903 produced (in two editions) a lovely but mysterious book called Color Problems for the Layman, in which she sought not so much to analyze the components of color itself, but rather to quantify the overall interpretative effect of color on the imagination.  I know this sounds begging and vague, but I really haven’t been able to make much headway in the work.


I’m attracted to this effort because of its attempt at quantifying such abstract thoughts.

By virtue of this effort, though, Vanderpoel had produced a strikingly illustrated book, with 118 color plates, all very intense, and beautiful, and in its way exceptional—unique for it time perhaps.  Had the book been written thirty years or so hence we’d call it some sort of constructivist/constructionist artform.  But since the artwork in the book comes a decade before the first non-representational artwork in human history (or so), I don’t know exactly what to call it. 

I really don’t know what it is, but I know that it is not entirely accidental, this pre-non-representational artform, because controlled geometrical color art is not accidental. 

In trying to quantify the color images of the objects in her study, Vanderpoel establishes a 10x10 square grid, dividing all of the color in that object into individual units numbering to 100.  Then, somehow, she identifies the major colors and places them according to a system that I cannot understand within the grid.

The net effect is glorious.  I just don’t know how she got there—which isn’t normally a consideration in art, except that this work is an instructional on how to understand color in art and nature, and the explanation of the procedure is ethereal.  Vanderpoel was and remains a respected author on porcelains and other applied and plastic arts.  In this work she looked at her fair share of porcelain, limogues, clay pots, burial urns, glass shards, and the like; she also analyzed clouds, mummy cloths (and casings), dew on morning grass, brocade, the eye of a blue jay, feathers, and another hundred or so poetic arragenments of the stuff of teh world.  I still do not know what this book is trying to tell me, but I do know that it is remarkable.   

Outsider SciFi Comic Noir in Color: the Very Disturbing "Stardust" of Fletcher Hanks

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1935

[Source: J Blog, here.]

The Golden Age comic creations of Fletcher Hanks (1887-1976) have an Eraserhead, biological badness feel to them, for me.  They are extraordinary and interesting without being necessarily good, or even enjoyable.  They are definitely a high order of something, but what that is, exactly, I don't know.  OF his many accomplishments is a comic hero named Stardust, a scary god-like superhero of brutal intent, something that appears on Earth one day to fight crimes like a very grim crime-fighting undertaker. There isn't much emotion or feeling outside of some amount of fear and loathing--even when heads are being torn off and flung deep into space, there's not much concern.

The work is disturbing and maybe brilliantly crude. The use of color is grating and has in some very bizarre way a feeling of high-contrast noir black & white quality--it is very off-putting, as in the image above, with a yellow space and oddly-colored non-spinning Earth that a criminal mastermind has masterminded in order for humans to float into space

Stardust him/it/self is also a pail of wriggling trouble--he is a living thing of some sort, a god-ish type creature, that can change matter with thought, and can fly through air and space on brain/ether waves, can manipulate shapes of any object and turn into a star, among other things.  Stardust is also disproportionate to what we think of as properly proportioned, and can bloodlessly rip off a head or stuff a man-monkey into a small place with brute force when it seems a deforming ray would do.  Stardust also makes a rather bizarre appearance with a duplicate/extra Earth--a sub-category for this blog and the thing which brought my attention to Stardust in the first place:

[Source: Lambiek Comiclopedia, here.]

Even the name "Stardust" just feels wrong, like the strip on the whole. 

The Stardust adventure has it all so far as upset and disturbance goes--even the composition. For example, this panel showing the impending impact of explosive shells finding their mark on Earth, closely cropped in a silent stillness, making their way through yellow space to an Earth that is just barely included in the scene...and of course the one quickly drawn star.  It is definitely a very distinctive mind thinking this stuff up--and as others have pointed out, that thinking was probably done on a drunken stretch of deadline.

[Source here, single panel detail from full page below.]

Here's Stardust on his "accelerated ether waves" making his way through a blue space--I'd voe to know why Hanks saw the need from the dashed line inside the ether-fire:

A portrait of Stardust--other people have mentioned Henry Darger in relation to Hanks, and its a relation that I do not see most of the time, except for images like the following, which have a very high-scented montage cleanliness to it:

Perhaps it is just the color theory aspect that puts people in mind of Darger.

The odd thing is that Stardust is mostly a mask-like character, and the villains--even when their head is detached and rocketing through space--have more approachable and believable faces:

[Source: Pop Matters, here.]

"Have Mercy" indeed.  The embedded and troubled brilliance of Mr. Hanks did not. In roaming the internet for Mr. Hanks I've found some comparisons for him and William Burroughs, which is another connection I just do not see. At the base of it all Burroughs seems a  comic in a very dark sense; Hanks just seems very dark, in a hurried but very different way.

Here's a very interesting read on Hanks and his publisher: Graphic NYC.

"Where Light is declared to be not Similar"--Isaac Newton's First Publication, 1672

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1907

Next:  on Intitutionalized Nonthinking: the "Negro Pencil" 1938

"...Where Light is declared to be not Similar..."--from the "abstract" of Newton's experimentum crucis

There were four main contributors to the 19 February 1672 issue of the yet-young Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, (No. 80,  pp. 3075-3087). One original papers and three reviews of recently published books:  the first book was a description of the coast of eastern India by Phil. Baldeus; the second, a work on the philosophy of "Renati Des Cartes"; and third, "an essay on the advancement of MUSICK, by Thomas Salmon¹.  These three have a common trait in that they are mostly entirely forgotten though the works seem interesting to me.  The scientific paper was written by Isasac Newton:  "New Theory about Light and Colors".  Though it was his very first publication² (coming at age 29), it was already the result of years' worth of hard thought and experimentation³. It also among the most important things he ever published, and was a direct link to his superlative and iconic work published as Opticks in 1704.

(It is interesting to note that the date on the title page is given as "February 19, 1671/72". This refers to a bubble int he calendar system at the time, where in some quarters the old first day of the year was celebrated on March 25, a practice which didn't firmly disappear until 1752.  So th e"1671/72" bit refers to the year being 1671 according to the Old System and 1672 according to the New.)

Newton was simply the most important person in the history of science.  Aside from all of his many iconic and revolutionary accomplishments, one thing that sands out over the collective of greatness is that he applied a sameness in investigation of different fields, a constant standard of scientific method across the disciplines, which was not necessarily the case with science folks, even extending back into the dimness of the great ancient philosophers.  This in itself was a most major accomplishment.

A Half-Alphabet of Color by Isaac Newton, and What the Colors "Naked" and "Dead" Are (1659)

JF Science Books   Post 1880 

All material quoted below is from the magnificent The Newton Project website, which contains transcriptions of Newton's writing in science, alchemy and religion, and also contains much correspondence. 

There isn't quite a complete alphabet here, but I think it is close enough, and it does organize (for my mind) some early thinking on color-making by Isaac Newton (1642-1727) when he as 17 years old.  There's much of interest on the construction of color here, not the least of which is some prosaic methods for coloring dead people and a general color for clouds.  Things would get more involved, of course, as Sir Isaac would later write perhaps the most important books ever written on optics (in 1704).

After the half-alphabet there is an installment of Newton's mechanisms of art, containing instructions on the instruments of drawing, and how to do emblem work, prepare bases, how to shadow, how to enlarge and copy work, how to draw a landscape, and more.

But first, here's his list of how to make color.

How to prepare your colours
Such colours as have need of grinding you must grind them with faire water, then put them on a smoth chalk stone, & let them dry. then grind them againe with Gum water & reserve them in muscle shels for your use.

B is for Blood

A blood red colour.
Sinaper, lake, & vermillion make a good red.

Another
Take blew Inde & steepe it in water & put to it a little Verditer.

Another
Take some of the clearest blood of a sheepe & put it into a bladder & with a needle prick holes in thebottom of it then  <6r>  hang it up to dry in the sunne; & disolve it {i}n allum water according as you have need.

Charecole black & seacole black
Grind charcole very small with water, let it dry then grind it with oyle. thus make seacole black.

Putting Black-and-White Back into Color: 1930's Schoolrooms

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1840

Its easy to assume a modern prejudice regarding the interior decoration of 1910-1940 school rooms, allowing a certain conceit and picturing them in shades of gray, the images formed being "colored" by the images of those things that we have seen, almost all of which have turned up in black-and-white photographs or movies. But of course we know that this can't be true, and that Humphrey Bogart didn't always wear a gray worsted in his movies, and didn't move that gray suit through gray rooms. Its just that the image-formation is influenced by what we've seen, and since what we've seen of these rooms is mostly without color, then our images are difficult to assemble outside black-and-white.  This applies to just about everything from that era, which explains why it is such a glorious shock to see motion pictures or photographs of (say) New York City street scenes from 1944. (And why is it such a jolt to the visual system to learn that police cars in Chicago during the 1933 World's Fair were orange?)

This thinking came to the surface again this morning when I uncovered the Paint Specifications for the Model School, prepared for the East Cleveland Board of Education under supervision of the Foremost Authorities, and published by ARCO in 1939.  It reminds us that the only thing that lived in black-and-white in those days are in our memories.  (I've written about unexpected color in Lost German Color of 1927,  The Very Describale Macro Color of 1937, The Color Green in the History of Squares, and of course the non-immortal 200,000,000 Pounds of Buttocks-or-Putting the Black-and-White back into Color, and others.   [This item is available for purchase via our bookstore blog, here.]

The rest of the ARCO catalog is below; but first, here's a sample from the 200,000,000 Pounds of Butts post, showing the 1938 barroom in color:

Lost German Color of 1927

JF Ptak Science Books    Quick Post

[Part of the series on Color and its Abuses, as with an example of "When Color is Best in Black-and-White", here.]
Nothing quite says no-color as German deep noir of the mid- and late-1920's.  These movies can be so deep and contrasted, so very black-and-white, with such stark Moon-like shadows, no dawn or dusk just night and day, that it can make you forget that outside of the photographs and movies that people were moving around in great swirls of color.  And nothing quite helps you to remember this than by having a look at a book like one below, a DIY piece printed in Berlin in 1927, the Farbige Wohraume¹.

It is of interest here because in addition to blueprints and sections of the furniture to be built, there are associated illustrations showing the completed work placed in a decorated room.  And it just so happens that these rooms are highly, colorfully decorated--not that there's so much in the room, per se, but there is definitely a lot of color. [This book is available from our blog bookstore, here.]

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

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 (1912):

 

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."

The Very Describable Macro Color of 1930's Floors--Well...Color, Symbolism and Swastikas in Floor

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1334    

I remember that the floor of my grandmother's beauty salon (in Great Barrington, Massachusetts) was a dark (gray on black?) rolled linoleum affair, not much different from the floors that you'd see (if you could see them) in black and white movies from the 1930's.  Grandma's floors were probably that old--my memory is from the early 1960's and the salon was far older than that--and so they looked like you'd expect an old, shiny, kept floor to look.  Plus you'd never really see floors in those older films, anyway, so it was difficult to see even if there was a design, let alone imaging a color.

  That's why it is so surprising to see magnificently-colored floors in catalogs such as Armstrong Cork Company's  Better Floor for Better Business (1936) and Home Decorator's Idea Book (1931). (Both of these booklets are available for purchase from our blog bookstore.) Color wasn't invented after World War II--it just seems that way.  Color photographs, color home films and color motion pictures really didn't get a popular start until then, so it might be natural to assume that the world was a bit more bland in shades of gray before then.

All the same, these floors are so terrifically colorful that they look to me to be like a tiny design writ large--like a design for nightclub's matchbook cover done on a 500 square foot canvas. 

[This is a kindergarten room, by the way.]

See what I mean? These floors are beautiful in a way that escapes beauty.  I don't particularly like them nor would I want to live on them, but they do have a certain inescapable loveliness to them that is just not beautiful.  Perhaps it is the odd juxtaposition of unexpected color. This is seen in sharper detail (left) in a post that a made ("There Was a Rubber Lady in a Rubber Room...) earlier in this blog.  Or maybe it is the unexpected combination of colors, or the unexpectedness of the colors themselves, that is the driver to this lusciousness.

And then there are the swastikas.

Now the swastika is a very, very old symbol, thousands of years old, transcontinental, transoceanic, a transcendental image that was completely and forever corrupted by the National Socialist Party, a shameful symbol, a symbol turned into a hatefuil and horrible thing in just 20 years or so, overtaking two millenia of use.  And here we are, in the early- and mid-1930's, during the time of the Nazis and Hitler and their free use of the swastika, here we are with this Armstrong firm from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, still using the swastika in design elements for their floors. 

(Here's one page of floor design elements from the Armstrong catalog at left; and the detail for design number three at right.)

Armstrong was also in the heart of some country within the United States (Lancaster) that was very rich in symbolist design, but I think that this has nothing to do with anything.  I'm also not making th case for their being fascist leanings at Armstrong--I'm simply pointing out that even as late as 1938 (when another edition of this work appeared again with swastika design) that the image was still acceptable enough to have as part of a part of a floor.  It strikes me as deeply odd.

Here's another example from the 1936 catalog (and just to be perfectly clear I'm not highlighting the swastika part--it is offset in different colors in the originals):

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I'm not seeing Nazis in my porridge, though Madison Sqaure Garden was still getting filled up by American Nazis for their German Bund meeting in 1936--I'm just pointing out that it seems surpising that the symbol was still being used in popular design as late as it was. 

 

Word Art: the Landscape of the Vocabulary of Kandinsky's "Concerning the Spiritual in Art"

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1126

Confession: this may represent the coziest I'll ever be with the written lessons of Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1910). It seems to me that anyone who is an artist understands this book; to me, though, as a not-an-artist,  it is  inscrutable--the book winds up looking not much more to me than this Word Cloud. Its a shame for me, really, as this is one of my favorite periods in the history of art, and I enjoy color theory, and I like mixing up sensations and analogies to describe cross-field experiences (like the broad use Kandinsky makes here in describing artistic qualities in terms of music) all of which are strong elements of the book. Its a lovely book, with heavy paper, wide margins, and beautifully designed, but the text is mostly just words, and sometimes a jumbled pile at that. I've tried to read it many times over the years, but I keep on failing this book.

The War of the Diagonals: Mondrian, Van Doesburg and Star Trek

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1079

In a world constructed of nothing but right angles in horizontals and verticals,  how would a diagonal fare?

Would it be like extraordinary confusion and then recognition of a sphere in a flat two dimensional world (as in Edwin Abbott’s Flatland), or would it be an astonishing moment of discovery like Robert Hooke’s Micrographia images, or a creeping, sweeping acknowledgment of first-seen perspective in Paolo Uccello? 

In the case of the cubist Piet Mondrian, it would be revulsion and disgust.  Mondrian helped establish¹ De Stijl (1917or thereabouts), with a philosophy of using lines to transform artistic thought onto canvas, and the lines were all horizontal or vertical, with square and rectangular shapes. These would represent the pure harmonies of expression, along with the primary colors as well as black and white. 
 
Mondrian wrote “:... this new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say, natural form and colour. On the contrary, it should find its expression in the abstraction of form and colour, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary colour."

Stijl co-founder, popularist, artist and editor of the movement’s journal, Theo van Doesburgh and his work (1924) introduced diagonals into the horizontal/vertical field in his painting “Arithmetische Compositie” and Mondrian quits the group.Van Doesburgh felt that the diagonal was more vital and important than the vertical and horizontal.  Mondrian felt that this was wrong, and clearly raked the original ideals of De Stijl, and so quit the movement, which he felt to be compromised by one of its co-founders.

I can certainly appreciate Mondrian’s need to go; though, honestly, what the debate and reticence reminds me of is an episode from the original Star Trek series, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" (1969).  The story is about an intractable difference between two seemingly identical factions of the planet Cheron²–it turns out that the differences between the two sides is a physical one that was inconsequential to the crew of the Enterprise, but of all-consuming importance to the Cheronites.  They were both white and back, their skin color cleanly halving  their bodies on the vertical.  But the "inconsequential" difference was that one person was black on the right side and white on the left; the other was the opposite.  It was this difference that led to their planet-wide schism and abandonment of each other. 

Its no wonder that the writers of that episode chose the name "Cheron", which is another accepted spelling of "Charon", the Greek ferryman who transports the dead to Hades.

That's where this particular schism falls to me, though to those involved I've no doubt that the differences were as significant as 2D vs. 3D and flat perspective vs. real perspective, the blatant if not micrographic differences looming mighty small to everyone but those involved. 
______
Notes

1. In 1917 it was Mondrian who coined the term Nieuwe Beelding (“the New Plastic”) , or Neo-Plasticism, from which De Stijl took its meaning.  He set out the philosophy of the group in that same year in a series of twelve articles in the group’s journal, De Stijl

2. From Wikia Entertainment:  "Cheron is a Class M planet located in the southern region of the galaxy near the Coalsack, which once supported a humanoid civilization of Cheron natives. In the 23rd century, the area of space was largely unexplored by Starfleet, so the race was previously unknown to the Federation."

Seeing Vision: Examples of Light and Sight, Personified

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 976

(On seeing the morning’s rising sun): “Looks like light to me.” SpongeBob SquarePants 

“All the fifty years of conscious brooding have brought me no closer to answer the question, 'What are light quanta?' Of course today every rascal thinks he knows the answer, but he is deluding himself.”  A. Einstein

“Are not gross bodies and light convertible into one another, and may not bodies receive much of their activity from the particles of light which enter into their composition?” I. Newton, Opticks, 1704, Query 30.

Depicting the capacity of sight and nature of light has been both an easy and a knotty problem in the history of science. Over the successive theories on the basis of light the artistic presentation of the phenomenon has been generalized (generally) in a very simple way:  by straight lines.  There’s certainly nothing wrong with that, the lines are just parenthetic place-holders suggesting direction, not actual descriptors of what light “looks” like.

There are literally hundreds if not thousands of images printed 1550-1850 to call upon to make this point, and I've selected but a few.  The first belongs to Jesuit astronomer Christoph Scheiner and which appeared in his  Oculusm hoc est: fundamentum opticum...,printed in Innsbruck in 1619. His work is an out-and-out landmark in the history of optics,  physiological optics and ophthahlmometry, and provided a springboard for two generations following him, not the least of whom was Rene Descartes. The illustration above is the book's frontispiece, and features four camera obscuras demonstrating four principles of the eye, the middle ground of which is a beam of light 

Rene Descartes depicted the interpretation (in his  Principles of Philosophy of 1644) of light and its physiological reaction in the brain as follows:

the lines of sight depicting binocular vision, observed (and compressed) by the eye's "particles" and processed by the pineal gland which in turn manipulate the "fluids" in the control of nerves and muscles. 

Another example of even greater fame than the iconic image by Descartes is that of the diagram showing the connection between color and its reflective index by Isaac Newton, appearing in his Opticae of 1706.

 

Another fine example comes from Zacharias Traber's (1611-1679) beautifully illustrated classic of optics (and physiological optics) , Nervus Opticus sive Tractatus Theoricus..., published in Vienna in 1690.  Traber is a great collector and synthesizer of the work done during and before his time, using the work of Descartes, Kepler, Schott, Kircher, Scheiner and Aguilon (for example), and then further implementing their ideas especially in the areas of color theory  and light refraction.  The image certainly reflects Jesuit Traber's religious training, depicting the holy source of light (originating with the almighty force) which directs it to the sun; the light then is left to the inquisitive and playful hands of cherubs who reflect and magnify it, as well as use it to start a fire (from the condensing lens) and observe it through a telescope. The main cherub empties a sack containing a number of different optical tools, no doubt for the playful brethern beneath. 

 

And then of course there is the great, unstoppable, polymathic and sometimes incorrect Jesuit Athanasius Kircher.  This image appears in his masterwork Ars Magna lucis et umbrae, printed in Amsterdam in 1671, which deals with light and shadow, optical illusions, color, refraction, projection and distortion, sundials, mirrors, as well as astronomical subjects. Most of these subjects are clearly seen in the engraved frontispiece to the work (below), the source of all of the "rays" of light coming from the godhead, relayed through a telescope, reflected from a mirror, and gathered in a camera obscura. 

 

Other interesting images from the Kircher include this spotlight.

Red Sky in the Renassiance: the Reverse of Geometry

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 913

What if our eyes worked in the “opposite” way?  What if we somehow broadcast the lines of reality from our eyes¹ rather than receive photonic emissions from the physical world, that we didn’t specify the wavelength and frequency of light, and that somehow electromagnetic rumblings in the “visual range” didn’t apply to our sense of sight?

This would certainly make for an interesting  existence if somehow the elements around us weren’t necessarily so.  Perhaps this is sort of replacement reality is just what has been going on in the entire history of humans, altering the landscape to make it more suitable for our existence, a long history of painting the physical landscape with something more “suitable”, an individualized creation. 

This all came up wondering about this fantastic sky, produced 475 years before non-representational art and 455 years before Gauguin started applying big blankets of red² :  it seems to me in a distant impression that it is a representation of vision that is more a projector than a camera..  The end result of this emission and wayward thought is the fabulous red sky in the painting Nativity by Master Francke³ (ca. 1424-1436) is a fantastic red sky with lustrous stars.

The painting is otherwise filled with the common reliables of Renaissance iconography concerning the nativity:  the place of “birth” (a stable or barn-like building, also sometimes appearing as a classical ruin or cave), a flock of sheep, a stand of trees, and the watch sensate gazes of the near by beasts.  Mary is ecstatic in the same ways that Joseph is usually not—to me, he usually seems pretty detached from the whole deal, lost in another space.  The baby Christ is again just a little man (and not a baby) laying there on the barren ground.  [I’ve wondered about Joseph’s detachment:  perhaps the whole scene is nothing but mysterious, a complexity far removed from his reach and understanding, a notion of an act that is so phenomenal that there is no retrievable reaction for it, and so he looks away.  Later on in the history of Mary and Joseph, and deep into the 19^th century when the Immaculate Conception—that is, the sexless conception of Mary the mother of Christ which she would later accomplish for her own baby—the issue of Joseph’s own virginity comes up, mounting the confusion no doubt in Joseph’s already-full head.]

But back to the sky:  certainly skies and backgrounds of pure gold and blue painted by the masters in Sienna and Florence abound during this time, but red is quite unusual.  The sky is accented by the terrific red of the wings of the angels and more softly so in the hair of the (long-fingered) Madonna. 

There is also the issue of the hole in the sky, revealing the large-handed Creator with glimpses of the alternate, higher, existence visible in the background, a taste of the alpha (or omega?) part of the long arch of Earth-borne humanity.

Notes

1.The discussion of optics and vision is one of the most spectacular conversations ever held in the history of science and philosophy (along with "time", "motion" and "the void".  I think that Leonardo would've come closest in relatively-modern times to understanding vision if he had the real capacity of dissecting the eye (which in spite of many approaches to experiment) would always go flat, leaving him with an unsatisfying mess.

In Aristotle's Physics (Book II, Part II) we find the following fascinating thought:

"Similar evidence is supplied by the more physical of the branches of mathematics, such as optics, harmonics, and astronomy. These are in a way the reverse of geometry. While geometry investigates physical lines but not qua physical, optics investigates mathematical lines, but qua physical not qua mathematical"

A classical position of the emission theory of optics is stated by Hero in his Definitions:

"Optics does not deal with physical questions and does not study whether given rays flowing out from the eyes go forth to the boundaries of objects or whether images that are detached go forth from corporeal objects [and] enter the eye along a rectilinear path or whether the intervening air is stretched or contracted by the ray-like pneuma from the eye. It is only concerned whether, at each reception (of an image) the right direction of movement or tension is maintained as well as the requirement that the convergence to a point occurs at an angle when objects are seen that are larger or smaller than the eye."

(My thanks to Dr. Kim Veltman for these quotes from her Continuity and Discovery in Optics and Astronomy, Studies on Leonardo da Vinci http://www.sumscorp.com/books/contin/title.html)

2. I had Gauguin's 1888 "After the Sermon/Jacob Wrestling the Angel" in mind for an example of this.

3. Master Francke active (c. 1424 – 36 ), Nativity, in the Kunsthalle, Hamburg; oil on oak, 39x35 inches. Hamburg, Kunsthalle. “German painter who worked in Hamburg, where in 1424 he painted a huge altarpiece for the company of merchants who traded with England, the so-called ‘Englandfahrer Altar’, originally placed in their chapel in the Johanniskirche (remnants in Hamburg, Kunsthalle). When closed, the double-winged altarpiece displayed four scenes from the life of S. Thomas Becket, the patron saint of the company, above four scenes from the life of the Virgin (e.g. Nativity;). Opened, the altarpiece showed scenes from the Passion of Christ. Francke was a leader of the northern German version of International Gothic. He had close links with French book illumination (he may have worked in Paris for some time) and the paintings of the Rhineland, especially those of Conrad van Soest , though it is not known where he received his training.”

Other Nativity scenes as follows:

A River of Odd Color: Unexpected Color Images of Food, 1949

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 728  Blog Bookstore

What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! Heart of Darkness

Coming on the heels of yesterday’s post about (impossible) retinal memory and the comfort of unusual color comes this bit of oddness from the House of La Rosa.  101 Ways to Prepare Macaroni seems about as benign and forgettable a title that one could write; that said, once opened, this little pamphlet poured its heart out to the Naïve Surreal in us all with the unforgettable (and accurate) color images of the promised linguine delicacies.  Honestly, the cover is why I have the thing—it is kind of perfect, a spare design that gets the message across, and leaves plenty of white.  It also uses a macaroni typeface.  But once inside the imagination is left to wander quite a bit between the colors of these foods that you were supposed to cook. And eat. 

I’ve long been a fan of taking a good close look at the foods on the  tabletops and dining tables of country homes, diners, and simple restaurants from the 1930’s—actually the Library of Congress is a wonderful source for this kind of image, having many thousands of them digitized from their monumental FSA collection.  The vast majority of these though are in black and white.  There seems to be not much more comforting than a checkered tablecloth on which a huge spread is laid for a farm family and their hired hands: giant bowls of mashed potatoes, big plates of corn, a huge pitcher of milk, and so on.  I could dive right in.  (The image below--by FSA great Russell Lee, shows a Kilgore, Texas, roughneck stopping for lunch.  This is not exactly what I had in mind, but the man has a real plate, a beautiful bottle of milk, cutlery, and all wrapped up in heavy paper--this is what brought-from-home lunches should look like.  And it makes me hungry.)

Then for some reason I started assembling a few hundred images of red photo ads of foods from LIFE magazine from the 1940’s—these are truly spectacular things, the reddest ads in the history of advertising.  (I’ll get to these in a week.) 

 And then came this funny little pamphlet and its bizarre display of food coloring that is so contentious that it might be able to put folks off their food.  Have a look. I’m uncertain of what happened to color selection for food advertising at this time; I do know that it is confusing to our sensibilities. (Color reproduction is accurate.)

 

 

 

 

Revolutions in the Color "Red": Paul Gauguin and Edwin Hubble

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 531

A circus passed the house—still I feel the red in my mind.  Emily Dickinson, 1866

Color expresses something by itself.  V. van Gogh

Pure color!  You must sacrifice everything to it…  P. Gauguin

 
Standing in my friends Lucy & Andy Archie’s store, standing near a window and catching some sun on a cold stinking day, a large red jar cast a long red shadow along the wall, causing me to think about the color. (It was a pretty nice shadow.)

Red has turned up as an important color in terms of patriotic/vitriolic symbolism (as in the revolutions of 1848, Garibaldi, communism), Aztec cochinealial luxury,  important burial dress of the Cro-magnums,  signs of divine favor and condemnation, Roman red divine, Egyptian danger, royal cinnabar of China , Indian bridal dresses, Japanese heroic figures, and on and on (into the lower realms of red tape, blood red, fire, blind anger, love/passion, evil, crushing impropriety,  and etc.)

Red’s most important contributions, perhaps, at least in modern times of the past few hundred years or so, comes in the field of art and science—and its appearance really is pretty monumental, and weirdly coincidental in their placement in the chronology of Big Important Stuff.  The birth of impressionism (with Monet and the Salon des Refuses), the greatest change in the history of art since the rediscovery of perspective, and the solidification of spectrum analysis (Bunsen and Kirchhoff), both occurred around the period of 1859-1863—the great use of red for both of these developments would come somewhat later, though the red roots began here. 

The achievement of Bunsen and Kirchhoff, started in the epochal year of 1859 (the same year seeing the publication of the Origin), was nearly as spectacular as any other scientific achievement of that century.  The two men showed—and this would have been incredible to the mind of the 19^th century—that individual atoms had their own spectral signature.  When the Englishman William Huggins absorbed their work, he realized immediately (as did Bunsen and Kirchhoff) that the spectroscope could be turned on the sun and all the rest of it—the results of the experiments of these three revealed the elements of what stars were made of, something that must’ve seemed like science fiction come true.  The second part of the second step* in this fabulous discovery and application came 65 years later, when American astronomer Edwin Hubble** theorized and proved  that the red shift that occur in the spectra of all galaxies actually (a phenomenon which had been observed for years but not understood) meant that they were all racing away (at a speed proportional to their distance, Hubble’s Law) from the Earth—the basis of the Big Bang.  Cosmological significances aside, this was also a big deal for the advancement of color, as it really hadn’t played a very major part at all in the history of science to this point (excepting the brilliant occasional bits like Newton’s Opticks). Color just wasn’t a part of the great systems and ideas of Plato, Pythagoras, Aristotle, Euclid, Kepler, Newton and so on—it just didn’t come into play. 

 Now, as to the importance of Red in art.  It comes for me with Gauguin.  Gauguin and his red grass.  Red grass doesn’t mean anything today, but in the early 1880’s, well, red grass was, simply, everything.  It was a revolutionary idea to make the idea of what grass”is” subject to the color that the artist thought was demanded by it subject, and that all of this was an artistic variable in the control of each individual interpretation.  It happened right there in the middle of the Impressionist movement, and was the beginning of the end for representational art, the final blow to which would not occur until 1911 with Mr. Kandinsky.

 

This was a lot to blow through in under a thousand words, and undoubtedly I’ve slandered several good ideas—but I think overall that this is a reasonable idea, this importance of the color RED.  There’s much more to be said about the Impressionists and a whole bunch more on the absence of color in the history of science, but that’ll have to come later. 

Of no importance but of some smiling interest is the notion that the paintings that were rejected for exhibition in juried salons (in France in the 1860’s) and which were used in a new movement and in new “juried” shows called Salon des Refuses, were all stamped with an “R” on the back of their canvases.

 _______

*the first great advancement coming in the solving of the so-called “ultraviolet catastrophe”, arriving through the Maxwell equations of 1873 and riding into the quanta of Planck in 1899/1900 (and then to quantum mechanics).

**Hubble, Edwin, "A Relation between Distance and Radial Velocity among Extra-Galactic Nebulae" (1929) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of

America

, Volume 15, Issue 3, pp. 168-173

Things that Are and Aren't Dept: the Names of Colors

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 468

(Almost) in the beginning were monsters.  The epic battle that Moses wages early on is not with Pharaohs, but with the dragon(s?) that the creator itself had fought on the opening whisper of creation (Book of Job 26:12, Psalms 89:10) and who would again meet at the very last bits of the closing days.  Behemoth, Leviathan, Rehab may all well have been monsters to these ancient folks, but they very well might look like rhinoceros or crocs or hippos to us.  Monster demons like Rehab (Psalm 87:4), a slaughtering beast who would be reintroduced to a different part of the world as Tiamar who would or could also be known as the Red Sea,  lifted straight from Mesopotamian mythology and placed directly into that of the Old Testament among the rest of the borrowed stories and beliefs, a problem by any other name. Following names and their cyclonic twists, and absences and sudden  re-emergence through the history of storytelling is dizzying—just consult your Robert Graves on myths  if you want to have  your memory plumbed (the great poet and writer doing not such a poetical or writerly job in this effort).  Keeping an eye on the mix and mash of gods and goddess and associated super beings from thousands of years ago, the god of the old Testament makes it very clear and precise about just who he is in his self-introduction to Moses:  “I am the God thy Father, the God of  Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Exodus 3:6)

Equally almost in the beginning, again so far as the bible is concerned, are colors—before that maybe everything was black and white, or just white, or maybe just black, depending on your epistemological concept of everythingness or nothingness.  (It looks like green may be the first color mentioned in the bible, (Gen 1:30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so) though the mixing up of meat and veggie is a little confusing to me.))

Over the years color names themselves have creepethed among themselves like a vocabularic ocean, a fluid dynamic of naming.  Names have flowed across their individual spectra, some names sticking, some not; the originator of the concept of the naming of "red", the original namer of the color, lost to the earliest and deepest part f the collective human memory.

I don't know where many of the names of colors come from, or why.  Index to Color Names and Color Numbers of the Standard and Season Color Cards of America (published and created by the Textile Color Card Association), and published in 1923, is filled with color names whose meaning and origin are a mystery and whose necessity seem to hinge on sunspots.  Which is fine, though it might be interesting to have had color names more dependent on that which went before. Like the names of the streets on most of Connecticut Avenue in D.C. are alphabetical, and once the first 26 letters or so are monosyllabicly employed, the second set starts with two syllables, and then three.  It is a system that usefully indicates where long the long avenue you might be. It might be useful to employ such a method in color names; or not. 

And I suspect it would be "or not", unless the poetry and art and music inherent in these formulations would be imaginatively employed

But on to the color names:  Ambulance, Basketball, Bosom,  Cowboy,  Squirrel, Chit, Old, Nymph, Old mephisto, Pelt, Racket are examples of some of the mystery colors.                             

Some names which were part of institutionalized racism I'm sure are now gone:  Arab, Negro, African; Bagdahd (?), Bombay Brown,  Coolie Yellow, Coolie, Congo Brown, Egyptian Husk, Hankow (yellow), Kyoto Yellow, Korea Yellow, Mandarin Yellow, Punjab Brown, Kafir, Tar Baby.

But I've got to say, even though the names may not have much to do with the colors, most of the names in the pamphlet sound quite lovely, and many are yummy: London Smoke, Log Cabin, Leadville, Madonna, Naked, Pitchpine, Pompeii, Prelate, Smoked Pearl, Swamp, Lucky Stone, to name a few. Overall I doubt that this is what Newton, Goethe, Chevreul, Rood, Maxwell and the rest had in mind when they were figuring out what color *is*, but I do think that all of them had large enough poetic natures (Newton the weakest and Goethe by far the strongest) to appreciate the occasional beauty of naming.  The unbelievable Shakespeare seems not to have spent that much time on color (so far as I know, and I don;'t much about the Bard), but (in a dear-sweet-god understatement) other people did:  people like Richard Feynman synesthesically thought in mathematical color terms, others created musical  instruments which would produce color from music while most of the rest of the world produced music which conveyed color, and on and on.  And then of course there's the whole world of art.

But I won't go there now--I just wanted to follow this loose thread in what seemed to be a pretty inert pamphlet--in the end it opened itself to a lot of possibilities with just a little thinking.