Ptak Science Books

Color Music--Found Images and the Second Perfect Number.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post #93

(Notes for a Future Post)
I found these two beautiful lithographs a while ago—they are really quite gorgeous, and I don’t have a clue to their source.  They probably were printed in the 1860s or so, perhaps 1870s, which I thought—given their subject matter—would make their identification easier.  The subject matter is old, appearing hundreds of years before these images were published. For example, in 1690 the philosopher and constitutional muckrack John Locke reported on a blind synesthesiastic man “who...bragged one day that he now understood what scarlet signified ... It was like the sound of a trumpet.” 

Equating the frequency of sound waves with the corresponding wavelengths of light was a quest by Sir Isaac in 1704 (In the Opticks), while in 1742 the French mathematician Louis Bertrand Castel strengthened Newton’s proposal of a solid relationship between the seven colors and the seven units of the scale. Slightly later he  undertook the  construction of a clavecin oculaire--a light-organ--as a new musical instrument,. which would simultaneously produce both sound and the "correct" associated color for each note.  A century and a half later Bainbridge Bishop had constructed at least three color organs, while in 1893 Rimington had patented the name “color organ,” and had already toured with his own device, performing color tone presentations of the works of Chopin,

Bach, Wagner and Dvorak.  Experimentation of a new order took place in the early 20th century in the hands of Scriabin (who thought colors were associated with tonality, not with singular notes), Kandinsky, Schoenberg and Marc. 

Now, getting back to the “scale of colour” illustration, we find our anonymous author equating the following scales thus, beginning with the first column, reading top to bottom, and looking first at the underlying color:
C:  red, blue, orange, blue, yellow, violet and green.
D:  orange, blue, yellow, violet, green, red indigo
E:  yellow, violet, green, red, indigo, orange, blue.
F:  green, red, indigo, orange, blue, yellow, violet.

And so on through the scales of G, A and B. 

When you assign numerical values to each one of these colors (green=1, red 2, indigo=3, violet=4, red=5, green=6, yellow=7), the sum is 28. 
28 is an interesting number in itself, being the
second perfect number (following the first perfect number which is 6)—a perfect number being the sum of its divisors, including unity but excluding itself (so 28= 1+2+4+7+14).

The color systems proposed by Castel and Bainbrisge are as follows:

Castel

B (dark) violet Bb agate A violet Ab crimson G red F# orange
F golden yellow E yellow Eb olive green D green C# pale green C blue

Bainbridge
B violet-red Bb violet A violet-blue G# blue G green-blue
F# green F yellow-green E green-gold / yellow
D# yellow-orange D orange C# orange-red C red

The following chart is from the wonderful color/music siteVISUAL MUSIC.

Dismantling Reality--Euclid, Mondrian, Malevich, Lobachevsky and the Appearance and Disappearance of Form Through Geometry.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post #80

Today’s post comes via my wife Patti’s phoney baloney sandwich for our four-year-old Tessie.  It was a tight fit of geometric pieces made to cover slim pieces of bread that would fit into her bento boxes.  The form was lovely!  And—on the heels of yesterday’s post—it reminded me of the remarkable qualities of geometry, and the role it has played in the creation of the known and visible parameters of our world(s). Geometry has also played a very visible role in removing those parameters, for as much as the art has forced regularity in our thought, it has played just as large a role in challenging that structure.  What Euclid has given, Lobachevsky has both taken away (and added to). (Nikolai Lobachevsky [1792-1867] and Janos Boylai [1802-1860] each independently developed non-Euclidean geometries:  that is, they replaced Euclid's parallel postulate with the postulate that there is more than one parallel line through any given point, saying that the foundational fifth postulate of Euclid was not true.)

Take for example an image and idea from yesterday’s post regarding the engineer and art-geometer Oliver Byrne (who replaced much of the text of Euclid’s first six books by using an odd index of color) and Piet Mondrian.   The approach (as noted by Augustus de Morgan among others) is gorgeous but hokum—the effect though is pretty and it does define the areas of the geometric solids that I’d like to use here.  The approach that Byrne tried to develop and simplify Euclid for more general readers was to employ a peculiar art form of geometry to help classify the structure of the world—ordering the universe, and vice versa.

Piet Mondrian, who was one of the earliest artists to practice the new, revolutionary form of non-representational art—that is, producing art with no recognizable subject matter, no humans, or landscape or animals or bugs or whatever—uses very similar geometrical solids to reclassify all of existence into sensations and color forms.  Mondrian is more correctly classified as a constructivist, or cubist, and he uses the same tools to re-identify nature as Euclid developed to help classify the structure of the world.  This is his “Composition with red, Yellow and Blue” which was painted in 1930, a full eighteen years after Kandinsky created the first painting in this field. But there were other early pioneers in the non-representation field who exhibited a more mathematical aesthetic in liberating the object than we see in the first works than the great Kandinsky.  Umberto Boccioni (1912), Frank Kupka (1913), Olga Rozanova (1913), Liubov Popova (1914), Felix del Marle (1914) come quickly to mind,

though none leap to consciousness as quickly as Kasimir Malevich.  Malevich begins this work before 1910, and by 1913 he has produced such works as “samovar” in which the (samovar) object is dissected and moved to different places in the visual field on the back of geometrical objects.  But it is in 1915 that we are introduced to his extraordinary “Black and red Square”, where we find that he has removed all representation of objects—not only that, he has removed almost all of the forms, period.

On the other hand there is certainly a very long history of artistic adventures which have no recognizable subject, though the artists in these cases I am relatively certain about were not trying to replace the known stuff of our world with the not-yet-known.  Geometrical artistic expression at its base has been seen in mazes, labyrinths and mosaics for thousands of years.  I guess you could even make a case for architecture fulfilling this role as well it the buildings were taken as art forms.  But I’m interested here mostly with the artist intentionally choosing to obscure the known subject.

This leads to the troublesome forms of the French architect Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, 1887 –1965).  Leafing through his The Radiant City (Elements of a Doctrine of Urbanism to be Used as the Basis of Our Machine-Age Civilization, 1933) is a confusing affair.  As much as the man wants to rectify and save the world (his words, salve me fons pietatis) with his geometrical cities, replacing the mess of disorderly human civilization, his results, while giving a crispy clean order, are formidably lifeless (to me, at least), the organic and messy bits of human life de-fractured and placed in 90-degree containers.  Le Corbu complains about the American successes, there in 1930 or so, saying that the U.S. is a monument of achievement but for achieving the wrong things.  A little later in 1932 and 1933 however he does take time to make positive comments about the interesting experiments going in Fascist/Mussolini Italy and Stalin’s Soviet Union…it was common I know for thinking people to have such harmonious thoughts about these regimes, but there were plenty of others who kew and wrote about what was

really happening in those places, and Le Corbu was not one of them.)  The so-called positive elements of American advancements that Corbu took away with him back to France-- Taylorist and Fordist (Henry was a vehement anti Semite and Nazi sympathizer)  strategies adopted from American models to reorganize society—I think come vividly alive in his geometrical replacement of human habitation—call me old fashioned, but I just don’t like it.  I also don’t like it because it smacks so much of his disgust of capitalism (which he talks about as consumerism) and of his own right-wing political beliefs.  Le Corbusier followed these thoughts into the camps of philosophies like  the right-wing syndicalism of the French politician Hubert Lagardelle.  These also eased him into a position with the traitorous Vichy government during the Nazi occupation of France during WWII—he did cut ties with it in 1942, though only after the architectural plans he had developed for various projects were rejected.
 

[Another leading 20th century architect, Philip Johnson, had his own problems with admiration of fascist ideas, though the amoral and whorish Johnson would’ve have seen these ideas as “problematic” only insofar as they would keep them from working.  He was a decade-long Nazi sympathizer, and among many other things actually followed the Nazis as they stormed their way through Poland—something Johnson described as a (positively) “stirring” experience. He was in a separate class from the kinda-stupid Charles Lindbergh and the empty-suited-but-still-dangerous Prince Harry as Fascist trumpeters.  He was more on the level of detestable fascist intellectuals like Martin Heidegger and Ezra Pound. He was awful.]

It just so happens that two of the most towering names in 20th century architecture were embroidered into the fabric of Fascism, and I think that these ideas burn their way directly through the geometrical imagination of Le Corbusier. His brand of geometries lead us towards the human cog-and-wheel, tight-box, suffocating proclivities of his right-wing extremism, and is perhaps the worst sort of illustration for the use of that beautiful branch of mathematics

Just for the sake of clarity I've included this photo of Henry Ford becoming the third recipient of the Nazi Grand Cross of the German Eagle,  presented by Karl Kapp, German consul-general of Cleveland (left), and Fritz Hailer, German consul of Detroit (right). The other two recipients were Benito Mussolini and Count Ciano.

 
 

Shaping Space and Controlling What We See—Determining What Color “Is”, Emily Vanderpoel and Pre-Kandinsky Art

JF Ptak Science Books    Post #73

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.  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-believe 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 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.