Ptofessor Barnaby Fitzgerald Algorithms of Distance, Metaphors in Pictorial Language” Presentation 6th International Conference of the Arts in Society, Brandenburg Academy ofSciences and Humanities, Berlin, (5-10-11)The text attempts to elucidate the motives behind the breaking of perspectival constraints in art throughout the 19th and 20 centuries before World War II. It points to Cubism and Constructivism and most importantly Mondrian’s Neo-plasticism as salient examples of style and ideas about space and representation which attempted to transcend the mediating geometry of customary picture making, by enlistingmodern industrial methods of representation such as the ‘Parallel Isometry’ of William Farish, of 1822, and the methods of the École Polytechnique’ in Paris between 1770 and 1830. The narrative addresses, with feeling, the limits of naturalism within the range of expressions. Of particularinterest is Mondrian’s growth, the choices made by him and the truthfulness of his conclusions with regards to the destiny of serious painting in history. An effort is made to place Mondrian and others in a setting,described with a broad brush, made of a past and of a future. I summarize the great forces of political ferment, scientific experimentation and cultural analysis that characterize the last three quarters of the 19th century, with an eye to the fragmentation of imperialist hegemonies and the national unifications in Europe. The return of the monarchy in France, the Risorgimento in Italy and the rise of socialism paint a complex picture of industrial growth, disintegration of the Hapsburgs, unification of Germany and Italy, that together with a new urbanized, literate middle class rising from the ranks of the proletariat, all of whichfrustrates the traditional aspiration of monumental art and religious art, evolving into a language of pictorial thoughtwhich is intimate and real; whose methods of representation often coincide with parallel projections in Asian art, whichare coincidentally also those of industrial machine design. I use, partly as a contrast, William Dunning’s excellent work, ‘Changing Images of Pictorial Space’ who also paints large tracts of historic time in similar synthesis and sweep, though he reaches complementary conclusions. Dunning summarizes the same time period with “Space and composition … (were to become) … the central theme of modern art. Conceptual, infinite space was a consequence of the spatial illusion first realized by the artist.”1

1 William Dunning, ‘Changing Images of Pictorial Space’ cf p123

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I come close to mass communication and propaganda, without entering the territory to keep the text short. I bring in the notions in Marxist parlance of ‘ground’ ‘sedimentation’ and ‘hegemony’. Naturally I think of Le Corbusier as the embodiment of the architect of the future, as I imagine Mondrian would think of the architecture that makes picturesfinally irrelevant. Le Corbusier gives us a global architecture that would be a responsible expression of a caring and rational society.What is actually new in what has been so often called new in20th century modernism? What is actually and succinctly old about what is generally thought of as old in the period prior to the 20th century? They are not easy to extricate from each other, and one could always argue that the new is always a latent energy of what has grown old, and converselywhat remains strong and vital of the old has the capacity for renewal. Nonetheless there is much in modernism that was never seen or even imagined before as art, and its old age has arrived too brusquely. Modernism has devolved to taste and style from modernist philosophies of style and taste.In the story briefly told here the protagonists are dignified minds who dismissed the mercantile aspect of art making as a matter of course.

A Diaphanous Matrix

         

             Fig. 1: (School of) Guercino. “Della Scultura si,Della Pittura, no.’ Louvre, 17th Century          Fig. 2:

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Panowsky, ‘Perspective as Symbolic Form’, Diagram for‘Linear and Angular

                                        Perspective’ 

The two images above (Figs. 1&2) are related to each other in ways that the following text aims at unfolding briefly: one is from the Louvre, school of Guercino (17th Century) borrowed from Jacques Derrida’s ‘Memoirs of the Blind’ and the other 2. Erwin Panoswky’s diagram of contrast of angularversus linear perspective pictorial models from his ‘Perspective as Symbolic Form’. Notice that on the left in Panowsky’s diagram, the linear perspectival diagram, there is a line S which represents the picture plane mediating between the eye (A) and the viewed planes, CB and FD and SB. The diagram on the right represents the direct Greco-Roman description: no screen. The two images, Panowsky and Guercino, suggest areas of distress in picture making, best elucidated below when their implications are extended to architectural space and its modernist pictorial aims. 20th century Neo-plasticism, especially, attempts gestures ofwide orientation and expanding spatial synthesis; gestures that spill outside the pictorial, when by pictorial one refers to the figurative images of places and objects centered by a present but hidden eye. Pictures, through several centuries of perspectival refinement, arrived to theindustrial age removed from direct sensorial intuitions and became subject to complaints that painting mostly had come to examining painting: like writing, it is removed from thought while it examines speech.2

The advent of the ‘mediating’ picture plane after Brunelleschi and Alberti (1430ca) caused a series of momentous changes in pictorial space and with them a gradual

2 The story of the potter Butades’ daughter as the origin of Drawing, Pliny, ‘Natural History Book XXXV, section xliii: Baudelaire sees it as the sacrifice of direct perception for a mnemonic schemata. Jaques Derrida .Memoir of a Blind Man pgs 49, 50, 51. Also Jaques Derrida, Grammatologie p.292 “Modernist Painting avoids the frozen trap of traditional image making since its source is Geometry, the science of images that do respond to questions unlike Painting and Writing that freeze and kill the subject, as Rousseu complains, echoing Plato”. (see also J.J.Rousseau ‘Essay on Writing’)

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perfection, sophistication and final fossilization of artistic and cultural habits of order and perception, what Husserl would describe as ‘sedimentation’.3 After half a millennium of perspectival consensus many European painters struggled to widen ideas of the picture throughout the 19th century. It is tempting to surmise that ‘naturalism’ is the culmination of perspectival knowledge even when that link has not been completely established, since photographs (central perspective’s most recent incarnation) can hold mere coincidences of naturalism, while embedding less obvious forces, without being naturalism’s strictest expression. Cubism and its legacy (Constructivism and Neoplasticism mostnotably) are, to date, the bravest attempts to surmount the 600-year-old consensus that a diaphanous matrix-like repository of information (a picture plane-map or film) mustmediate the seen before the seer can fully understand his own location and orientation. The concept of location and relation supplanting the original experience is so powerful that only another radically dissimilar concept of the same power could finally dissolve it. Perspective and the ensuing modes of depiction made changes to the order of existence by restricting the visible to the coordinated area. What is located in coordinate space must then determine what is real, even before it belongs to a nominative occurrence. Furthermore, a philosophical consequence in art incrementally took shape between 1450 and1880 that gradually permitted more and more effluvial, peripheral, depiction outside of subject matter; informationthat while contributing to the viewer’s belief, was not central, and intimated the symbolic while remaining abstract.Admittedly Neoplasticism, and its immediate predecessors, notably Cubism and Constructivism, were not able to widely dissolve the recalcitrant cultural expectations of naturalistic picture making, which are still today the average expectation of painting in the general public. However, Cubism’s relief tactility and constructivism’s imaginative architectonics both have as originating ideograms the gestures of the hand more than the effects of the eye. For example, any fabricator’s instructions in manuals share the same origins, thus the same emotional

3 Edmund Husserl, Origins of Geometry p.174

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invitation to grasp and play out the meaning of what is shown with actions rather than feast on a spectacular miracle, in contemplative ecstasy.

                          

                                         Fig. 2a: William Farish,

Cambridge University, 1822 Trimetric MachineFig. 2b: Basawan,_ “The Burglar’s Escape” 21.5x12.3 Det.

1594, Tehran Arch. Mus) 

The chemist William Farish of Cambridge University publishedthe rules of Isometric Projection in 1822. ‘Isometric parallel projections’ had been used for millennia in one wayor another in pictorial art,

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                                               Fig. 3a: Li Ch’Eng_908-925 AD Kyoto Museum.                           Fig. 3b: Degas Le Bain 60 x 83 cm M. d’Orsay 1886 

but Farish codified them systematically. As a scientist, he developed ways of quantifying aspects of information that risked being wasted. In isometry he saw in a means of universal understanding of complicated objects, namely machinery otherwise graspable only through expertise. His visualization system, when it moves the horizontal to a diagonal position, is currently often called axonometric andis ubiquitous across industry. Notice Degas’ isometric composition in Figure 3b. Farish’s words denote a concise modernity; his system “is preferable to the common perspective on many accounts… it represents the straight lines, which lie on the principle directions, all on the same scale. The right angles contained by such lines are always represented either by angles of 60 Degrees or the supplement of 60 degrees.”4 First, most importantly, no ‘picture plane’ is mentioned; second, anyone will feel that the 60,120 degrees are actually 90 degrees in meaning. The

4 William Farish “Isometrical Perspective” Cambridge 1820, Introduction 

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psychology of any perceiver will readily adjust any other angle to the obtuse or acute versions proportionately without hesitation. Truly a new poetic meter and ‘versification’ of space! 100 years later Theo van Doesburgand others caused a sensation by exhibiting in Paris architectural designs of the De Stijl using isometric (now often called ‘axonometric’) systems. (See my illustrations in Note 4)

                                       

                 

Author’s Illustration: Barnaby Fitzgerald©2011

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                                Fig. 4a: Van Doesburg 1923-4b            Fig. 4b: Pompeii Affresco ca 110 AD, Napoli MuseoArcheologico  

This was a ‘descriptive system’ in the French Revolutionary École Polytechnique descriptive geometric sense of the word,in a simplified version of Farish, to clarify complex manuals in aid to an illiterate proletariat often responsible for the maintenance of textile and agricultural machinery. The projective geometry of the pre industrial ageoriginating in Desargues’ theorems (see note 4) of Monge at the French École Polytechnique, had been funded mainly by the military establishment to elaborate ballistics and fortification. No connection to art; nevertheless by the 1920’s, by the time of the first Bauhaus, descriptive geometry had evolved into a language, in art, of synthesis and modernist clarity.

Fig. 4c: El Lissitzky ‘Proun19D’ 1922

Scientific ‘description’ had been evolving long before Farish, and throughout the enlightenment (most keenly in France), it gathered its forces in the realms of engineeringand architecture. Desargues and Pascal in the 17th century had initiated projective geometry, a mode of inquiry of exquisite intellectual communication, nick-named ‘felt

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magnitudes’, that two hundred years later, via modern industrial design, arrived at the doorstep of the fine arts.

                              

                       Fig. 5a: G. Monge, Shadow of Cube from a LightSource ‘Infinitely Far’ and Shadows on

         a Sphere, (Traité De Geometrie Déscriptive’, École Polytechnique, Paris, 1775)

Fig. 5b: Contemporary Epicycloidal Gear),* (Fig 5a. From ‘Traité de Géometrie Déscriptive’

                                                               I.P. Paris 1755) 

William Ivins, curator of prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1916-1946, admonishes, “Desargues and Pascal, between them, developed the two basic theorems of the moderngeometry of Perspective. Those who think of Perspective onlyas a more or less unimportant subject in the curriculum of an art school should find food for thought in the fact that Desargues is reputed to have been the first to design epicycloidal gearing, and that every engineering and architectural school now requires that its students have a knowledge of descriptive geometry.”5

5 W. Ivins “On the Rationalization of Sight” p.11

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                                        Fig. 6: Brunelleschi’s Santa Maria Novella Appalto, 19th cent. Axonometric Elevation,                                                 Museo Del Duomo, Florence                  Fig. 7: Monge, Stuies of Curved Surfaces and their Intersections  

What had been through centuries a plan and elevation with 45degree shadows to show relief, as in Fig. 6, had morphed into the modeling, axonometric as it’s often called, perfected by engineers and adopted by designers and artists.

                                          

                                                                                          Fig. 8a: Lissitski Proun 1923

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                Fig. 8b: Bruce Nauman, 165.6x 203.2 Inches 1975, Private Collection              Fig. 8c: Anon. Boat-building Instruction Illustration in Nautical Magazine,  

Infinity had been tucked into the ‘10 infinities’: intricate,dualistic, models by Poncelet (prisoner of war in his Sartov jail cell in 1813), and as a result a tangible grandeur of logical space could be visualized and scaled at will.  

         

      Fig. 9a: Poncelet’s Theorem, (R. Kaplan Expository Drawing, p.218) 10 Infinities, allpoints are Lines and Vice Versa  Fig. 9b: Vladimir Malevich ‘Suprematist Composition’ 1915,Wilhelm Hack Museum

  Soon the fabricator’s sensibility within such visualization made its way into pictorial art.

Mondrian and Le Corbusier: Radical Schemata 

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Fig. 10: Mondrian 1907 Oil 75x120 cm

 

Above is one of Piet Mondrian’s last vesperal landscapes. Mondrian’s evolving anti-tragic and anti-naturalistic purity(by 1910) coincided with his own growing preference for seeing objects in sunlight6 because of the special kind of divisionist color patterns that ensue, and because of how shadows cast by the sun are diffuse solely in terms of the distance between object and surface, since the light source is infinitely far in a ‘one measure fits all’ scenario of a simpler range of diffusion,  

         

                                                Fig. 11a: Rysselberhe Theod. 1889 60 x 106 Oil on Canvas6 Serge Fauchereau “M. and the Neoplasticist Utopia’ Rizzoli 1994 p-15

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                         Fig. 11b: John Kirby Shadows Cast by Sun, Theory; 

that portends a plastic energy and exact thought, and that is architectural over pictorial; measured rather than guessed. 

         

                      Fig. 12a: Toorop, Jan Theodore, 1891 Oil on Canvas 61 x 66 in. Rijksmuseum                 Fig. 12b: Mondrian ‘Dunes’ 1909 Oil on Board 28.5x38.5 MOMA 

The ‘Luminist’ painting of Toorop and Theo van Rysselberghe had attracted Mondrian as early as 1908. He ‘was drawn to the scientific aspect of their work’ and ‘by 1910 ‘was regarded as one of the major representatives of this new aesthetic’.7

7 (Ibid. p 13)

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Fig. 13: Piet Mondrian ‘Truncated View of Broekzijer Mill’1902 30.2x38.1 cm MOMA

Mondrian was on a quest to identify one universal key to allaspects of art, which became, with Neoplasticism and Pictorial art (1917), the very concrete and architectural motif of the perpendicular (or the ‘orthogonal’). Whether ornot the motif is subliminally a Theosophic symbol for a religious meaning does not concern us here: in a practical tone he states “….. 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.”8

 

8 (Ibid.) p.24 In vastness “all curvature resolves itself to straighness” Author’s addendum: this is technically true of curves seen at infinite distance.

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                                                            Fig. 14a: Turner 1830 ca Projection of Shadows                                Fig. 14b: Humphrey Ditton 1712, Projections                                 Fig. 14c: Van Doesburg Hallof a University  

The spirit was one of radical simplification of visual rhetoric. Theo Van Doesburg9 soon will elaborate his own radical reduction of ‘elements’ when by 1924 (nine years after meeting Mondrian) he invents ‘Elementarism’. By the 30’s Le Corbusier is caught by a similar, violently sparse, philosophy. He wrote an ‘anthem to the perpendicular’ consisting of some verse and 19 paintings, and he insisted that straight lines and right angles were infact ‘natural to man and his nature’.10

9 Newton’s protégé, Humphrey Ditton, in his ‘Treatise on Perspective’ 1712 dedicated his work to ‘projection as opposed to appearance’)10 Le Corbusier ‘The City of Tomorrow’ p.19; 1929; MIT Transl. F Etchells,1971

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Fig. 15: Le Corbusier the Proportions of Earth to Sun (Notethe Scale of thought!) ‘Radiant City’ 1923)

Le Corbusier’s 1911 Journey to the Far East, (which ended, comically, in Turkey), was expressly a search for basic geometric principles. A Chinese like drawing in his metaphysically titled “Une Maison-Un Palais” supported his argument for a pure architecture. In the chapter called ‘Modern Conscience’ in Radiant City, le Corbusier states, “The horizon and the sky comfort our hearts continually.” And “There they are the basic pleasures. They are at our service…. They are strong enough to finish off the old worldand its money.”11 Le Corbusier is truly radical, in that his violent approach is fundamentally skeptical of cultural sentiment, while approving of basic pleasures such as horizontals. His thoughts are already totally cross-cultural. He consults ‘sensibility’, which he urgently distinguishes from the ‘senses’, “Sensibility or feeling is a categorical imperative which nothing can resist. Sensibility -some words have an odd fate- is precisely not a thing of the senses ..” and “It is something innate and violent; a goad, an ‘urge”12

11 (Ibid. p.15)12 (Ibid. p.39)

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Fig. 16: A Page from Kandinsky ‘Point-line and Plane’ p28.Bauhaus, 1926

In painting education and practice the polemical consensus that was still rigorous around 1900, in the Visual Arts, hadbeen linear perspective,

Fig. 17: Telemaco Signorini and 17b from Page 28, Point,Line and Plane, Kandinsky

which was considered far more central and taught in far more depth than is the custom in art schools today, where itholds an important, but equivocal place in art curriculi. Probing perspectival means a painter could cause a psychological dissolution of the pictorial surface to make the scene a continuous field extended towards and from the eye: a proto total immersion instrument, intimating motion, as in the Signorini landscape (fig 17), which pivots around a studied angle similar to Kandisnsky’s 90°< perpendicular

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in Fig 17b. With perspective’s practiced constraints followed a suite of attitudes towards geometry and its relationship to reality in terms of trajectory with a probing search for ‘just’ orientation. The consensus had been achieved on philosophical grounds, (as well as those ofvisual power) from the 15th Century. Before the humanism of the 15th and 16th centuries, images in theory were ranked in the ‘third order of importance’.13 With the discovery of the diagonal of the square vanishing at the same distance as theeye is to the picture plane, discovered by architect Brunnelleschi (1420 ca) the visual arts (i.e. narrative picture making) began a journey that sees them seated by the20th century beside the venerably established liberal arts. This could only have been allowed in the instance when the fact of a spatial situation was translated (literally) to the same fact located in a picture. A repetition that would usher in printmaking and Natural History as we know it today, as William Ivins recounts vividly in his ‘Rationalization of Sight’.                                         

                                                                             Fig. 18: Brunelleschi Baptistry Mirror, Typical Text Book Reconstruction                    Fig. 19: Alberti ‘Costruzione Legittima’Kemp p.23 PE=VZ) 

In Alberti’s ‘legitimate’ construction, (see Fig. 19) the event PE, became a picture with the SAME event VZ. The picture was now, inexorably, not just a similar fact, but

13 Plato, Republic, ch. Bk X

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the same fact occurring in the true and 3 dimensional world.One step closer, therefore, to the divine idea behind facts,and one step removed from the imitation of appearances, which had, for two millennia, relegated the visual arts (andpoetry) to their low standing in the Platonic model of the order of things, chiefly in Book X of Plato’s Republic. Imitation had merged with its objective asymptote at arm’s length, graduating to pure mathematics, the burgeoning language of all modern thought. “… without the development of perspective into descriptive geometry by Monge and into perspective geometry by Poncelet and his successors modern engineering and especially modern machinery could not exist”.14  

            

                                                Fig. 20a: Peter Eisenman House VI (iv) 2000, MOMA                      Fig. 20b: Mercedes Differential Gears Magazine Photo 

14 W. Ivins p11

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Fig. 20c: Elia Bonci ‘Teoria Delle Ombre’ (Contrast betweenSunlight and Lamp, in Terms of Diffusion) Milano 1937

Nevertheless the long tradition and growing demand for sophisticated visual meanings that by the 20th century perspective had demanded of the educated artist, only prepared Mondrian (and so many other artists) for the profound (and well known) dissatisfaction perspectival method gives in conveying the proximate distance of something immense. The northern tradition of keeping the perpendicular distance short, as Panowsky describes keenly in his “Perspective as Symbolic Form” (Ch. IV) my have brought the viewer close to the picture but not to the represented object particularly when this object or space islarge:  

                       

Fig. 21a: Turner ‘Circular Interior’, Maurice Davis, ‘Turneras Professor”, Tate 1990**(fig.

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  21, Geometry Lectures RA Summerset House 1800-1835 from Maurice Davis ‘T. as

                                                            Professor’ Tate 1990)                                         Fig. 21b: The Red Windmill Mondrian 

Mondrian “Indeed I find this windmill very beautiful. Particularly now that we are too close to it to view it in normal perspective and therefore cannot see it or draw it normally. From here it is very difficult merely to reproducewhat one sees: one must dare to try a freer mode of representation. In my early work, I tried repeatedly to represent things seen from close by, precisely because of the grandeur they then assume’.15 Despite Alberti’s (1450’s)centenary first grand concession in his own striking remark about reality being ‘la piú grassa Minerva’ (‘The fattest Wisdom’)16 It seems that the ability to touch the immense is actually not in the expressive province of artistic central perspective and belongs, rather, to the inner, or at least haptic intuitions of severely reductive orthogonals and perpendiculars. In non-euclidean geometry textbooks of the period in question around WWI curves are expressions on thisside of infinity of what at the border of infinite space would resume the straightness of Euclid’s postulates with regards the character of a geometric line between two points. D.M.Y Sommerville, in his widely read text of 1913,“The Elements of Non Euclidean Geometry” mentions that “All the theories of projective geometry can be at once transferred to non-euclidean geometry, for, so long as we are not dealing with actual metrical relations, non-euclidean geometry is in no way whatever distinguished from Euclidean.” (p 93) 

15 (Mondrian, “The New Art- The new Life” p.99, in ‘Mondrian the Neoplastic Utopia’ Serge Fauchereau). Addendum 17b D.M.Y Sommerville “The Elements of Non-Euclidean Geometry” Bell and Son, London 1914, p.9316 (Alberti ‘Della Pittura’ note 7 on ‘sensate wisdom of visual material’Book I)

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Fig. 22a: G.Monge Conics, Section to Ellipse;   Fig. 22b: Lissistski “Proun” 1923 

The rhetoric (in so many words) and dynamics of the culminating descriptive analyses of the Paris École Polytechnique. A reading of Mondrian and his own assessment of the implications of his art as ‘humanity in the confrontation with nature’,17 are the signs and methods of the École Polytechnique under Monge. By the 1920’s these signs, patterns and schematic ideograms already ubiquitous in Constructivism, formed the new ingredients of modernist design in the Der Stijl. The tone of Le Corbusier’s ‘RadiantCity’ and much about what he says elsewhere also indicates an embrace of geometric acuity as an artistic emotion per se. 

17 (Faucherau p.39)

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                 Fig. 23: N.Poussin 1658 Blind Orion Searching for the Sun 119.1 x 182.9 cm Met

Fig. 24: Peter Schimdt ‘Das Naturzeichnen’ Berlin 1828-32 Parallel Light Rays from the                                                                   Sun 

The beginning of modernity, is usually placed at various chronological points after the period of the Italian Renaissance. It’s reasonable to guess modernity’s beginning around the time of René Descartes’s “Treaty on Method” (1630). Descartes’ coordinate space is the culmination of Renaissance visual rationalization, but also it is a philosophy of observation that inaugurates the enlightenmentand the abandonment of the theatrics of superstition. To Michel Foucault18 the period, mid 17th century, constitutesthe first of two great ‘discontinuities’ in history. In hislapidary premise, Foucault identifies it as the first big break with the Middle Ages and the long road from late antiquity. The 17th century bourgeoning rationality can be seen in Poussin’s mature work. Poussin’s compositional approach aspires to clarity of pictorial development and luminosity of concept. ‘Blind Orion Searching for the Sun’ (Fig. 23) is an example of an image where the orientation, movement and space picture a whole serene attentiveness. Similarly, though for apollonian transparency, Jean Racine’s

18 Foucault ‘The order of things’ 1970 xxii (Les Mots et les Choses)

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(1639-1699) stagecraft is reductive and free of naturalisticdistraction.The second discontinuity (when the word ‘modern’ actually comes to light), following Foucault’s premise, is the first quarter of the 19th century. This latest ‘modernism’ in certain ways reflected cultural aspects of the first discontinuity, that of the ‘classical age’ of the mid 17thcentury.19 Both periods offer society a luminous sense of design of an uncluttered and utterly reasonable way of feeling space. The first of the two is arguably a longing for an ancient lost dignity, and the second, in contrast, for a new modern clarity. Despite Romanticism’s avowed rebellion against science and industry many schematic conditions between the two periods coincide aesthetically. Even Romantic painting at its best and Impressionism strive for a spherical order sublimating the seriffed animated calligraphy of the Rococo.

Modernity: The 2nd Discontinuity: A Brief History

Fig. 25: Caravaggio Martyrdom of Peter, S.M. Del Popolo,Rome

19 Dunning p.115

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In the role of vehicle of transmission of the deepest congregational sentiments art gradually became obsolete, once the artist lost aristocratic patronage with the rise ofthe middle class after the French Revolution. Increasingly, the artist ‘could not calculate the impact of art on a faceless crowd’.20 Cities had grown with large numbers of proletarians who were moving from the rural settings seekingwork in industry. From the proletarian the petit aristocracy, formerly the source of growing social service, gained the numbers and force of a large, new, educated and secular bourgeoisie. The ballooning size and complexities ofmonarchic bureaucracies throughout the 19th century were wrought with problems of order and systemization precluding,administratively, ‘narcotizing half measures’.21 By the finaldissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire through WWI its institutions had been, effectively, in shambles, as were theinstitutions of the other monarchies in continental Europe, incapable of assimilating the progressive forces of nationalism. It wasn’t obvious, in any way, that the final outcome of national hegemonies would translate to democraticinstitutions. Also the transnational, and frail, hegemony ofthe great European empires increasingly highlighted the irreconcilable frictions between societies bound by militaryconquest and little else. Marx’s Communist Manifesto writtenshortly after the French (1948) rebellion aspired to a kind of transnational unity hitherto only achieved by the empires. Nationalism was to prevail in spirit until the catastrophe of the First World War.The Austrian poet, Franz Grillparzer, wrote “The Hungarian hates the Bohemian, the Bohemian hates the German, and the Italian hates them all, and as horses absurdly harnessed together, they will scatter in all directions as soon as theadvancing spirit of the times will waken and brake the bonds’.22  

20 Dunning p 115-11621 Oscar Jászi ‘The dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy” 1929 U.Chicago p.1122 Oscar Jászi (quoting from F.Grillparzer ‘Tristia ex Ponto’ (1835))

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Fig. 26: Manet _The Asparagus 1880 16.5 x 21.5 cm Musd’Orsay

For a good part of the 19th Century, national unities were the predominant revolutionary issues. Republicanism in France had readopted monarchical politics in part to unify the face of the state. 

Fig. 27: Daumier ‘ca n’est pas trés solide!’ Napoleon IIIbeing Held up by Victor Hugo and Giridier

The Risorgimento in Italy was to oscillate between monarchism and republicanism according to ideals and doubts about ‘unity’, a unity that could incorporate deep differences into a national identity. Foucault has termed modern the period as early as the first quarter of the 19th century.23 So far, modern styles of thought and craft ware prevalent in the areas of civil/military engineering, urbanization, communication systems and underground politics. Typical academic content in Music, Literature or the Fine Arts, was characterized, in Europe, by Romanticism and Bonapartism. English Romantic poetry demonized mechanization, as any close reading of Blake, Coleridge or Wordsworth would attest. Beethoven dedicated a symphony to 23 Foucault ‘The order of things’ 1973 xxii

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Napoleon, albeit before he crowned himself emperor. In the same anti-progressive spirit, Goethe had made Kant and Newton models for intellectual stalemate in his ‘Faust, PartI’.24 Nevertheless, scientific and even artistic experimentation and analysis (John Ruskin) fomented an ameliorative progressive mood which reigned in much of the 19th century, all the more shaken by the Franco Prussian war (1871) and shattered by WWI (1914). The ‘great war’ dealt aterrible blow to intellectual confidence in the ruling classes. It’s devastation rejuvenated socialist arguments onone side and highlighted the failure of the European monarchies on the other. The rhetoric of rebellion, perfected with Nationalism, with Socialist and absolutist leanings became the rhetoric of art.My analysis is in contrast to the critic William Dunning25 who, with a bold stroke, links 16th century form-over-content(Mannierism) to 20th century avant-garde formalism, which he proposes to have begun in 1889, the same year that Darwin published ‘the Origin of the Species’. “This formalism came to dominate both critic and artist in avant-garde art from Manet through Minimalism”. In the little still lives by Manet (figs. 26 & 28) the horizontal plane is placed isometrically as in a scientific illustration (see fig 28b).The mood is one of inquiry without estrus. Furthermore the experiment in the paintings is a spatial one, more than it is a naturalistic one, the light, too, angled at the same angle as the objects. A direct, schematized, flattened spacethat could only find a place in the Salon des Refusés with the Déjourner sur l’Herbe of 1863. 

                                       

                    

24 Walter Kaufman “Goethe Kant and Hegel” Volume I Discovering the Mind (1980), 2nd ed. Transaction 1998 pages 29, 33-3425 Dunning p.69

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                                      Fig. 28a: Manet 1864 45 x 73.5 cm M.d’Orsay                           Fig. 28b: Anon. Isometric Analysis of Curves 

“Space” he continues, “and composition … (were to become) … the central theme of modern art. Conceptual, infinite space was a consequence of the spatial illusion first realized by the artist.”26  

                                       

                                                                                                                                   Fig. 29a: Robert Morris ‘Untitled’ 1967 National Gallery                          Fig. 29b: Canaletto’s Camera Oscura, Venice, Museo Correr 

It is remarkable that the word ‘conceptual’ as recently as 1991 is used in the context of spatiality rather than to cultural polemic, which serves to remind us that space, as avehicle of design and accommodation, of course IS indeed conceptual in the authentic meaning of concept in art.27 It is worth noting that, since the 1960’s, social and politicalissues have pervaded art practice and criticism to become the predominant material of conceptual art and its ramifications into relational art of today.28 It has been thetransformation of the authority of the artist to the 26 (Ibid p.116)27 (Note of interest, Martin Kemp, ‘The Science of Art’: focus is called ‘accommodation’ in English 18th century optical theory p. 234.)

28

authority of what the artist has discovered, deduced by the critic, which is absolutely functional and common property, and therefore valid.

                                  

                                       Fig. 30a: Malevich 1913 108 x 71cm oc Kuibyshev Museum of Fine Arts       Fig. 30b: Oskar Schlemmer 108x71cm, 1923 Bauhaus Workshop, MOMA 

It’s therefore startling, in respected criticism, as in the case of William Dunning, to see a quaint idea persist, namely that artistic invention is the domain of the individual genius, especially when the era in discussion is early Modernism. The premise that advancement is achieved through solitary genius, however, clashes from time to time with the evidence.

28 (Francis Fukuyama ‘The End of History and the Last Man’ p.61, Avon 1992) The seminal idea of Fredrich Engel’s to enroll Hegel’s dialectics as “method” separated from Hegel’s content was, it turns out, prophetic.The critic’s role seems to have evolved, in the last decades, into an obligation to be fundamental: a mandate to find a cultural hegemony, a ‘theory of everything’ by means of detecting an a priori set of artistic formulas: perhaps this can be considered the sole absolutism permitted in the ambience of western liberal democracy, now that not a few can finally afford to give radical Marxism, formerly dangerous, its aura of academic acceptability. The model of a ‘costruzione legittima’ of one sort or another, has found new prophets in the centuries since Alberti; most important of whom are Hegel and Karl Marx.

29

                          

                                                                 Fig. 31c: Rodchenko _Spatial Construction 1920                                      Fig. 31d: Tatlin’s Monument to 3rd International: Reconstruction 

Notwithstanding, Dunning suggests himself that comparing languages, not personal propensities, is a way to better summarize certain spatial conundrums and ensuing pictorial inventions. “It would be easier to examine the limitations of Indo-European language, for example, from the vantage point of another language, such as Ewe ”.29 In the preface to ‘The order of things’ Foucault recounts that he breaks up in a belly laugh when, on reading Borges he is told of a Chinese encyclopedia where animals are divided into hilarious categories, “… in the wonderment of these taxonomies …is demonstrated the exotic charm of another system of thought, is (demonstrated) the limitation of our own”.30 A particular language hides, the limitations inherent in its usage and hence highlights what it cannot see at the very instance that is seems ‘limitless’.31 In light of what seems to be the typical trial and error progress of artistic invention, then, William Farish’s eminently practical idea of adapting a completely familiar language, that of Isometry, a language of spontaneous familiarity

29 Dunning p. 117-11830 (Ibid. p118).31 Derrida “Les Mots et les Choses’ Preface

30

            Fig. 31a: Tempio di Venere Genitrice, Roma MuseiArcheologici, pamphlet

Fig. 31b: Brunelleschi, Schematic of Construction of S.M.delFiore, 19th Century, Museo

                                                             Del Duomo 

making immediately comprehensible the new complexities of industrial design, in my view, demonstrates how art can truly evolve from interdisciplinary occupations. A languagethat is immediately graspable to all can be more effective, even in art, than the solipsistic confrontations, provocations or obstacles erected by individual artists whose mission it has been to expand that linguistic horizon,by adding (lamentably) to a babble of private vocabularies the code to which is possessed and guarded by privilege.  

31

Fig. 32: Edward Quinn, Picasso á la Californie 1950 ca

 

Adventures that, to a great extent, are sanctioned and financed by the cultural habit of believing artists are esoteric shamans, or as meta-anthropomorphic organs like Ezra Pound’s proverbial ‘antennae of the race’.  

Fig. 33: De Chirico 1917 ‘Il Fedele Servitore’ Egg-oilEmulsion on Panel, MOMA

 

Dunning continues by using algebra (to carry on with Derrida’s analogy) as an example of a ‘language’ best suitedto probe many things which written and spoken language

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cannot follow.32 Analogously, the vast majority of visual evidence at our disposal, even while exuding comfort with subject matter in ‘pictures’, of scenes of many kinds in advertisements, pop culture etc. risks being singularly unsuited in conveying, in terms of genuine common sense (i.e. collectively) any effective location and distribution of useful meaning… seldom does an illusion equal a state of belief.And if by illusion one has hallucination in mind, then as art its power is un-sustained. Pictures don’t necessarily become art when they are producedartistically. See the John Currin Oil painting (fig 34) 

Fig. 34: John Currin, Portrait, 1992, Private Collection

And compare it to a black and white analysis of a Malevich by Patricia Railing (fig35) 

32 Derrida, ‘Of Grammatology’ 1976 p.6 also Dunning p119

33

Fig. 35: Analysis of Malevich, Patricia Railing 1992

Both Patricia Railing and Malevich, 80 years apart, are prying into the reasons of pictorial effect, while Currin isusing pictorial effect for his own reasons. 

Fig. 36: Desargues ‘Perspective’ 1636

That so many artists find in geometry a language that can guide them into the pictorial realm, is not a choice of style but a choice of content, driven by curiosity first andperhaps also by an ancillary awareness of the beauty of geometry’s sparseness.

34

                    

                                                                    Fig. 37a:John Ruskin ‘Skies’ The Elements of Drawing’         Fig. 37b: Malevich, ‘The House of the Future’ 1924 Pen and Ink

Architecture Over Painting

Fig. 38: Mondrian 1911 55.5 cm High, Oil on Canvas,Minneapolis College of Art & Design

Mondrian was an accomplished easel painter first and foremost, which must have made his position that painting isa means to a cultural end that precludes paintings a painfulstance. I suggest in this text that the origins of Neoplasticism’s visual ideas are found in descriptive geometry more than in they are found in Cubism. Still the

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question remains, why did Mondrian, an accomplished and exciting easel painter, see architecture replace painting?Except to say that the tradition of painting is not situatedin the bosom of egalitarian thought, and had been for centuries nurtured in the belief in the magical extraordinary power of individual genius, what could have been the force that would make a group of modernists, between 1905 and 1950, strive for an aesthetic where the sense of collective quantification would elbow to the side the ineffable picturesque?

Fig. 39: Rodchenko, Photograph 1927 23.6 x29.2 cm EastmanHouse

In the lectures of his course ‘Art in the Machine Age’ at Yale 1981, Robert Herbert used to remind his students that Vladimir Tatlin’s definition of art is ‘something that can be telegraphed’. Tatlin’s 400 meter tower (never built…) was to be inclined 23.5 degrees, the same angle as the earth’s tilt… in the spirit of popular demonstration.

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Fig. 40: Carrie Mae Weems when/where/ Tatlin’s Model,Whitney 1992

‘Anyone’ as a whole benefits, that is, by ‘understanding’ through ‘clear instruction’. ‘Anyone’ means that large body of individuals endowed with that which the Marxist theorist Ernesto Laclau’s calls “radical representability.” And, to quote Laclau, “ if there is a ground to the social –which is a condition of itsrepresentability- and if, as a result, society can be considered as an orderly series of effects, that is as a totality.”33 During struggles for unity and emancipation in the 19th Century, (Napoleon haunting collective memory even so), perhaps the cultural hero had morphed into a political one: to Yeats a feverish opinionated gargoyle that ‘drank the wind’ and ‘took a mess of shadows for its meat’.34 As Fukuyama states, describing what it takes, “To make a revolution and create an entirely new society requires remarkable individuals with greater than usual hardness, vision, ruthlessness, and intelligence, characteristics which all these early Bolsheviks possessed in abundance”35 Inart, too, the models for the fortitude required in the explosive ‘undecidability’36 of the three decades before WWI could have shifted from heroic and sentimental art to tough political posturing art. Le Corbusier dedicates his ‘radiantCity’ (1933) to ‘Authority’. That such a thing could grow33 Laclau “Emancipations” Power and Representation p.834 William Butler Yeats, ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’35 Fukuyama p. 30436 Laclau, The Logic of the Spectre p.68

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disproportionally fatal within little less than a decade wasbeyond his divinatory power. Perhaps his ideas may have beenformed more by the 19th, not the 20th century he was living.

Fig. 41: Radiant City, 1933, Front Inner Cover Page, NoticeDedication to ‘Authority’ Upper Left

I must mention that after the first World War, compelling individual and even political painting which was not modernistic at all had been a strong presence in society. The new ‘machine age’ aesthetic only shared the public attention, not being the sole compelling kind if imagery.37 Yet it would be the simpler, luminous, constructivist and

37 Examples of André de Segonzac, Jules Pascin, Otto Dix, George Grosz.

A.deSegonzac ‘Isadora Duncan’ 1910 Pencil, British Museum

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neo cubist to characterize the modern age far more convincingly than the paintings of artists like Honoré De Segonzac, Jules Pascin and Antonio Donghi, who were, one could argue, just as innovative, should that have been the key issue. ( see figures in note 39).

Old Miracles and New Terms“…experience attains form as man reacts to a constantly changing environment.”38 Kaminsky’s words suggest a way of bringing these thoughts to a provisional conclusion.

Otto Dix 1926, Dr. Mayer-Herman MOMA

Jules Pascin 1917, 8 x 10 Barnes Collection, PA

38 Jack Kaminsky ‘Hegel on Art’ Albany U 1962 from Dunning (Ibid)

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Fig. 42: Velasquez, “Las Melinas” 1656 Oil on Canvas, 276 x318 cm, Prado

Somewhere in ‘Art and Illusion’ Gombrich mentions casually that perspective is about not seeing around corners. Everyone smiles at this passage when they first come across it, since its lineage is of few but inexorably valid observations about painting. One of the first of such aphorisms is that painting is an ‘immobile’ reflection, and that its success or failure is bound to the artist’s skilful‘immersion’ of that deathly echo and transcendence of it through (self) love39, (see fig 42, Velasquez).Although such a vital and unlikely miracle of overcoming death’s stillness will forever have a key place in pictorialart, there has been added a crucial accomplishment, modernism, that mobilized an ardent commonality that has grown as a vital source of artistic momentum since the earlypart of the 19th century. Praise is due to those, both in science and in art, who addressed the need to find visualization techniques 

39 Philostratus, ‘Imagines’ Book 1 section 1, Scamander (23)

40

                                        

                                                                      Fig.43: Calatrava Milwakee Museum Wing w. Boom                   Fig. 44: Leonardo ‘wing mechanisms’, Windsor Castle 

in order to make comprehensible design intricacies otherwiseexcluded from people without long experience in some aspect of industry or science.

                 

                                                             Fig. 45: Caltrava Santa Cruz Concert Hall 1991                              Fig. 46: Naum Gabo 1937Construction) 

41

The relationships of pictorial aims to collective action have added ideas of representation unmediated by any latent surrogate memory. Memory has been shown to be an anticipatory impulse, ready for direct action. The modernistmemory is the “faculty without history, tragedy or events”.40

All manner of collective action does in fact take place all the time and it does so compelled by beauty, insofar as the abstraction of an art constitutes its beauty. Unfortunatelytoo much beauty is made to be beyond reach and thus to causeextravagant price. However, I hope to have shown there is now, by means of the modernist stance, an alternative beauty, clearly and effortlessly integrated into a visual language in order to become action and inspiration. William Farish, Pascal and persons from all disciplines, contributedto pictorial art a system of intellectual fair play: parallel projection, which has proved to be beautiful and useful.

                 40 Derrida “Memoirs of a Blind Man” On Baudelaire p.47

42

                         

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ReferencesAristotle “Poetics” (Trans. S.H.Butcher) (Witch 1997)D. M.Y Sommerville “The Elements of Non-Euclidean

Geometry” Bell and Son, London 1914E. Panowsky ‘Perspective as Symbolic Form’ (Zone 1997)E. Bonci ‘Teoria delle Ombre’ (Hoepli, Milano 1937)E. Laclau “Emancipations” (Verso 1996)Edmund Husserl, Origins of Geometry (JP Leavy Trans.

Introd. J Derrida, Nicholas Hays LTD 1978)F. Fukuyama “The end of History” (Avon 1992)H. Ditton ‘Treatise on Perspective’ (London 1712)Holtzman/James “The new Art – The new Life” (Twayne

1986)J. Derrida/G.C.Spivak ‘Of Grammatology’ (J.Hopkins

1974) J. Kaminsky “Hegel on Art” (Albany 1962)J. Derrida ‘Memoirs of the Blind”1990, Pompidou Ctr.

(Chicago 1993 ‘Memoirs of a Blind Man’)J. V.Field/J.J.Gray “The Geometrical Work of Giscard

Desargues” (Springer-Verlag 1987)Kandinsky ‘Point, Line and Plane’ 1923 (Derstyne/Rebay

Trans.) (Guggenheim 1947)Le Corbusier ‘The City of Tomorrow’ (1929) MIT Transl.

F.Etchells 1971Le Corbusier ‘The Radiant City’ (Faber & Faber 1933)L. B.Alberti “On Painting” G.Spencer Trans. (Yale 1956)Monge ‘Traité de Géometrie Déscriptive’ (Insitute

Polytechnique Paris 1755)M. Davis ‘Turner as Professor’ (Tate 1990)M. Foucault ‘Les Mots et les Choses’ (1970 Random

House)M. Kemp “The Science of Art” (Yale 1990)O. Jászi “The Dissolution of the Hapsburg Monarchy”

(1929 Chicago)P. Railing “On Suprematism, 34 Drawings” (Artists Books

1990)Pliny the Elder, Natural History, AD 23 (H.Rackam

Trans.)Philostratus the Elder, Imagines, (A.Fairbanks Trans.)R. Kaplan ‘Art of the Infinite’ (Oxford 2003) S. Fauchereau ‘Mondrian and the Neoplasticist Utopia’

(Rizzoli 1994)

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W. Ivins ‘On the rationalization of sight’ (DaCapo 1973)

W. Dunning ‘Changing images of Pictorial Space’ (Syracuse 1991)

W. Kauffman “Goethe, Kant and Hegel” (Vol.I Discoveringthe mind, 1980) (Transaction 1998)

W. Farish ‘Isometrical Perspective’ (Cambridge 1822)

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