mid-century art: its scientific analysis and its role in education

REVIEW ARTICLE MID-CENTURY ART: ITS SCIENTIFIC ANALYSIS AND ITS ROLE IN EDUCATION Vision + Value Series. Gyorgy Kepes (ed.). Education of Vision.

Structure in New York: Geo. Braziller, Inc., 1965, pp. 189 +

New York: Geo. BraziHer,

New York: Geo. Braziller, Inc., 1965, pp. 233+vii. Art and Science. vii. Inc., 1965, pp. 195 + xi.

The Nature of Art and Motion.

DOES THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF A R T OR THE AESTHETIC APPRECIATION OF THE WORLD OF NATURE PROVIDE A N Y CLUES TO MORE EFFECTIVE HUMAN LIVING I N THE TWENTIETH CENTURY WORLD? Can relations be found between our scientific knowledge of the world of nature and our knowledge of the elements of art that will deepen our understanding of either? These are the questions posed by M.I.T. Professor of Visual Design Gyorgy Kepes, editor of three volumes in Braziller’s Vision +Value Series. The books, which contain forty-two essays and hundreds of illustrations, are entitled Education of Vision, Structure in Art and Science, and The Nature o j Art and Motion.’ On the basis of his remarks in three introductory essays, there is no question that editor Kepes is prepared to answer the questions affirmatively.

Artistic vision, Kepes asserts, combines “scientific cognition” and “simple sense-feeling response,” thus uniting sense, emotion, and rationality to “overcome the formlessness of our contemporary world” (EOV, iii). In connection with what Kepes takes to be our knowledge of the structure of the natural world, he predicts that “we may build, from our rich, many-faceted range of structural knowledge, a structure of structures, a new sense of interdependence between knowledge and feeling-and thus a keener and more profound awareness of our own time” (SAS, iv). And with reference to the general theme of all three of these volumes, Kepes declares, “. . . our new vistas will Come together if we find the common boundaries of the two interdependent important ways of responding to the world that we call art and science” (NAM, xi).

Indeed, we shall see that they deal with questions far narrower in scope than those which concern the editor. This is so because only a limited range of sciences is selected for discussion, and because the conception of art that is developed throughout the essays is narrower still. Art, for the writers of the essays, is almost exclusively taken to be non-representational art. Thus one might suspect the books to present a rather limited conception of the implications for human living of the interrelations between art and science. With a few exceptions which I shall discuss in somewhat greater detail, the essays seem to be asking after the relations between certain selected sciences and certain types of contemporary art. I shall devote a

The essays themselves do not attack Kepes’ questions so directly.

‘Throughout the remainder of this essay, these books will be referred to, respectively, as EOV, SAS, and NAM.

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separate section, concluding with a general summary, to each volume. end of this review I shall summarize my impressions of all three volumes.

At the

I. EDUCATION OF VISION The writers

address themselves to the topic of vision and visual form, rather than to art per se. There are three exceptions: an essay by Bartlett Hayes traces the changes in art education in the United States over the past century; Wolfgang Metzger’s essay concludes that the aesthetic taste of youngsters is in fact influenced by what they see and hear as they grow up; and Julian Beinart describes urban African folk art and the recent efforts of African painters. The concern with the arts in these three essays is not quite consonant with what the editor and the other authors occupy themselves with: visual form and nonverbal thinking.

The fourteen essays in this volume all deal with education.

This theme is clearly introduced in the opening essay, “Visual Thinking,” by psychologist and aesthetician Rudolf Arnheim. The Western tradition, he writes, has emphasized the distinction between sensation and thought, the gathering-in of “sense-data” through the sensory organs, and thinking as an act of a separate entity, mind. Because of this, Western education has been domi- nated by a concern for the training of mind-a process given over to the making of abstractions and generalizations by means of words and numbers. Arnheim thinks the emphasis has been misplaced for, since we do much of our thinking visu- ally, education should be equally concerned with the training of visual thinking.

We might infer that Arnheim is calling not for two kinds of education, but for a single, more comprehensive kind, since for him thinking is not an event that occurs after the sense organs have made their reports, but is an event that occurs within perception; that is, the act of perception is itself cognitive, and it need not always be attended by overt or covert verbalization. Arnheim’s illustrations convincingly support his point: the men who (successfully) carry the piano up- stairs are obviously thinking, but their verbalization is minimal. For those who may doubt the cognitive respectability of piano-moving, Arnheim also cites the thinking of chess players and of Albert Einstein, who claimed that in his own work he first thought in images, and only secondarily in words.

Because “visual thinking,” when i t is intelligently undertaken, produces important results, Arnheim would have educators spend more time in cultivating it (although he says little about how educators might go about such a task). In conclusion he suggests that no culture will produce a widely meaningful art unless it is first “pervaded by creative visual thought.”

Although it may be too brief to be more than suggestive: the educational import of Arnheim’s essay is clear, and i t is the focal essay of EOV. Most of the other essays carry his thinking in one of two directions: either they elaborate his theme by way of example, as in several discussions of the teaching of visual design, or they make a point similar to his in discussions of “intuition,” “metaphorical

Those interested in pursuing Arnheim’s work more intensively might profitably consult his Art and VisuuZ Perception (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954).

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thought,” or “a common visual lang~age.”~ other essays fare as they pursue these directions.

We will look briefly a t how the

Five essays in EOV elaborate the aims and procedures of courses in the teaching of visual design. Of these, the efforts of designers Tomas Maldonado and Paul Rand appear to be the most substantial. Maldonado makes two important points in raising the question of the relation of visual design to the particular socioeconomic context in which objects are to be purchased and used. First, the designer who in pursuit of “artistic truth” ignores the social function and economic context of the objects he designs, is not likely to produce anything either very useful or very beautiful. And second, the problems of design in a noncompetitive economic context may be quite different from those in a competitive economy where the design of goods may take precedence in the marketplace over their functional quality. One might wish that Maldonado had gone further, discussing perhaps the phenomenon of planned obsolescence and its relation to visual design in a competitive economy. But the import of his remarks for education is still important. Social responsibility in teaching, even in so specialized a field as visual design, involves considerations far broader than the particular technical specialties in question. Maldonado’s point could easily be expanded and applied to any field of vocational, technical, or professional education.

Following a different course, Paul Rand directs his attention to a more specialized and, strictly speaking, pedagogical problem: in the teaching of design, how is it possible to arouse the curiosity of students, hold their attention, and stimulate creative effort? For Rand, the answer is to present the student with a problem that has defined limits or rules within which he must work, yet which allows him a measure of freedom for intellectual play. Beyond that, Rand favors extending the problem into its practical or commercial applications. Rand‘s thesis is richly elaborated with illustrative examples, and his point is the more impressive for his having (presumably) arrived at i t through the process of classroom teaching. Yet he might have found support in a wide range of educational theorizing, from Dewey’s discussions of problem-solving to Bruner’s emphasis on discovery, and from discussions of play in education and art from Schiller to Herbert Read, to modern game-theory. The form of Rand‘s solutions, if sound, should apply in any field of educational effort, whatever the content.

Three other essays discuss the teaching of design. While one must respect the sincerity with which they are written, they do not easily lend themselves to verification or analysis (e.g., “the student’s . . . powers are most valuable when they are directed by the creative spiritual center of the heart”).

The other essays which in different ways elaborate Arnheim’s notion of visual thinking also suffer from an overabundance of effusive and metaphorical language.

TWO exceptions are the essays of designer Will Burtin and physicist Gerald Holton. These writers are not so much concerned with the education of vision as they are with the ways in which visual stimuli can assist education in other areas, especially the sciences. Thus their concern is with what we would call visual aids. The Burtin essay leans heavily on illustrations which, because they are not labelled, are virtually impossible to relate to Burtin’s text. Holton’s long essay on visual aids in science teaching is interlarded with references to different levels of “reality” to which different kinds of visual materials are appropriate. Thus Holton offers a sort of metaphysics for those who must read and run.


Not atypical is sculptor Mirko Basaldella’s rhapsody on Arnheim’s theme, in which it is promised that the re-establishment of a common visual language will restore man’s “magic sense of life.” The common visual language turns out to be one based on the allegedly fixed emotional meanings of classifiable abstract forms. This seems a rather heavy burden to place on the shoulders of so esoteric an art form.

The total impression one gets from the essays in EOV in just a little ambiguous. One is never quite sure whether i t is vision itself that will profit from a better and more deliberate education, or whether all of man’s processes of thinking and feeling will profit from a better and more deliberate education of vision. While they pursue different directions, the essays of Arnheim, Maldonado, and Rand are useful and clear in their intent. But most of the remaining essays, despite occasional insights, all suffer from a carelessly romantic use of language that obscures clear understanding.

11. STRUCTURE IN ART AND SCIENCE It would be inaccurate to say that the essays in SAS are “about” structure,

since each of the authors uses that term according to his own lights. Architect- inventor Buckminster Fuller and mathematician Jacob Bronowski, whom we shall consider first, come closest to fulfilling the promise set forth in editor Kepes’ introduction. Both writers attempt to see whether a consideration of structure in the natural world affords a better understanding of the creative and construc- tive efforts of men.

Fuller attempts to show how architecture will be more rationally practiced if it conforms in its structural principles to structures found in nature. Although analytical geometry and Cartesian coordinates are best suited to the analysis of ninety-degree angled structures, Fuller declares that the structures actually found in nature consist of spherical agglomerations which coordinate a t angles of sixty degrees. BY way of illustration, he points out that billiard balls pack naturally and tightly into a sixty-degree angled triangle, but that when one tries to arrange them into a ninety-degree angled square, the balls roll around. In terms of three dimensions, Fuller finds the tetrahedron to be a key structure in nature, and finds corroboration in the tetrahedral configurations of organic chemistry, in metals, in viruses and in algae. In condemnation of much of contemporary architecture, Fuller concludes that cubes are invalid as structural building units. Instead, he recommends the use of tetrahedronal complexes which employ natural forces and eliminate waste of both time and material. Fuller’s illustrative discussion and photographs of his own ingenious geodesic buildings lend great weight to his argument. Although architecture is the focus of this essay, Fuller’s reinter- pretation of the mathematics of science may be considerable interest to those concerned with the teaching of science.

Jacob Bronowski’s essay is an attempt to show how historical changes in the advance of science parallel changes in the practices and forms of art. Contem- porary scientists study invisible logical patterns (“structures”) that explain the outward appearance and behavior of things; artists, sensitive to this intellectual change (he claims), have also increasingly concerned themselves with forms of expression in which only the total pattern expresses order. Bronowski puts most

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of his support for this last thesis in a discussion of the sculptures and drawings of Henry Moore. To take Bronowski’s example, Moore’s drawings, unlike the strong outline drawings of Leonardo or Rodin, are created by an accumulation of small nervous lines scribbled one over the other, such that the underlying structure emerges only as a total pattern, not as an outlined shape.

Bronowski appears to be more facile a t speculation than a t gathering evidence. The example of Henry Moore as a contemporary artist whose work reveals the kinds of interests pursued by scientists is hardly more than suggestive, and counter- examples are easily found. Bronowski’s description of Moore’s drawings is equally applicable to the drawings of Daumier (who died in 1879); his description of the strong outline drawings of Leonardo and Rodin is equally applicable to scores of contemporary artists, including Picasso.

The other essays in SAS fall into one of three categories. There are, first, speculations about structures in the world studied by science, with and without analogies to art. Second, there are discussions about architecture, wherein the term “structure,” when mentioned, refers unambiguously to buildings. And third, a number of essays deal with painting, wherein the term “structure” is used to mean the arrangement of colors on a plane surface. We will look briefly a t the essays in each of these three categories in turn.

Three essays on structure lead the reader in widely disparate directions. Lancelot L. Whyte’s notion of structure in science exorcises atomism and then reintroduces i t by asserting that what is structured are “discrete units” or “localiz- able parts.” Cyril Stanley Smith finds “rich aesthetic content” in patterns of crystal growth, and makes some unsupported analogies between the laws of such growth and the “mind’s reaction” in aesthetic responses. And Richard Held looks hopefully for an “information processing mechanism,” “inherent to the human nervous system,” that will help us understand how i t is that our image of the visual world corresponds to the “real” world.

Five essays that deal solely with architecture range from the soberly descrip tive to the dogmatically prescriptive. Two essays, one by architects Fumihiko Maki and Masato Ohtaka, and another by Alison and Peter Smithson, describe the visual consequences of designing buildings or groups of buildings in careful relation to the multiple functions they are to serve. The other three essays pos- tulate architectural “laws” in terminology that only a lawyer should have to decipher.

The three essays that discuss painting all apparently take structure to mean “a flat surface covered with colors arranged in a‘ certain order.” Critic Margit Stabler claims that while meaning in painting was formerly a function of what was represented, i t is now a function of purely formal elements. A “grammar of structure,” such as that provided by Kandinsky’s discussion of “primordial visual elements,” e.g., points and lines, will help us in “decoding” the painting’s aesthetic intention. Despite all the grammar and syntax, Stabler saves the day for romance in art by declaring that painting also has an “essential quality,” immune to ra- tional decoding, for which a viewer needs only “receptiveness.” With little else to go on save these declarations, a reader when confronted by a painting will be left to his own devices in deciding which is which.


In an essay entitled “Structure and Communication,” I. A. Richards dis- penses with the notion of structure altogether, and concerns himself entirely with the prerequisites for teaching and learning a language. Richards stresses the need for careful sequential presentation in teaching, and believes that instructional programs, films, tapes, and teaching machines will help. He then pursues a number of different directions, asserting that learning to learn should take precedence over mere “reproduction of received impressions,” discussing the techniques of teaching someone a foreign language (in which he emphasizes exclusive use of the new language during instruction), and proposing some techniques for teaching reading, in which he recommends simplicity, the avoidance of “sugar coated” distractions, and the utility of success as the sole reward for learning. He concludes with strictures against the notion that a language can somehow be taught independently of the subject matters, attitudes toward life, aspirations, etc., that are most appropriately expressed in that language. Rich in pedagogical sugges- tions, Richards’ essay is wholly methodological and does not deal to any great extent with problems of motivation or reasons why particular things should be taught.

While Richards did not trouble himself to elaborate the notion of structure, the sculptor Richard Lippold returns to the theme, but only to let the air out of it. Structure is illusion, he claims, for whenever we try to describe a thing or event from one point of view, a new point of view-and a new “structure”- manifests itself. The illusions, however, are not inconsequential, for whether they are proposed by scientists, artists, or prophets, they have their utility in guiding mankind through what would otherwise be perceived as chaos. But in time, new structures, new ideas, new knowledge will replace the old. That editor Kepes has a heavy investment in the utility of a stable concept of structure is revealed when in his introduction he recognizes Lippold‘s essay as a “dissenting voice” that is to be regarded as a “playful evasion.” Lippold is indeed a bit playful a t times (blank pages appear in his article as illustrations of being full of emptiness, and black pages appear as being “deliciously void of nothing”), but he does not appear to have evaded anything. Like monarchs who tolerated the uncomfortable truths of their court jesters, Kepes seems to tolerate Lippold’s essay by calling i t sport.

Those who were not clear about the ways in which a concept of structure applies similarly, or analogously, to both art and science, will not be any clearer about these matters after having read SAS. Of course, when so many knights return empty-handed, one begins to suspect that there is no holy grail. If this were the case, then one should have to settle for tales of love and adventure gath- ered on the trip. This is indeed the case with SAS. The writers who went off seeking structure came back with confusion. Excepting the ingenious essay of Buckminster Fuller’s, and the dissenting essay of Richard Lippold’s, what re- mains of value in the essays are the observations and speculations made when the writers abandoned the quest for structure and pursued their own interests. Editor Kepes’ holy grail of structure, seen from the inside, seems to be an empty cup.

111, THE NATURE OF ART AND MOTION The essays in NAM are intended to relate art, science, and meaningful living

through scientific analyses and artistic interpretations of motion. The volume

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begins with descriptive accounts of motion and its alleged effects on the human psyche, shifts to discussions of how motion is subjectively perceived, and concludes with accounts of the ways in which motion is exhibited and interpreted through art. The essays examined below are in the order in which they were arranged in the book.

The three opening essays in NAM all suffer from a lack of clarity that vitiates their authors’ claims. Physicist Gerald Holton asserts that artistic representa- tions of motion show historical changes similar to those that occurred in scientific explanations of motion. Respecting the expression of motion, Holton concludes that i t is as far from Navaho sand painting to cinematography, mobiles, and action painting as it is from the primal motion of Greek nature-philosophy to motion as indicated on an oscilloscope screen. Unfortunately, the reader is not put in a position of being able to test the truth of this claim. It isn’t clear whether the distance from Navaho sand painting to cinematography is to be measured in feet, years, style, content, or what.

In showing that evolutionary concepts developed in the natural sciences may be fruitfully applied to an understanding of cultural history, art historian James S. Ackerman makes some fundamental mistakes. Not having ever characterized what he meant by “art,” his (nontestable) claim that men have “drives to create and to imitate” leaves the reader wondering what it is that men have drives to create and imitate. Ackerman also speaks of great works of art as being “adapted”

everywhere and a t all times”-an assertion quite out of keeping with the concepts of evolution that appear in the natural sciences. Finally, his parallels between natural and cultural evolution seem not to take into sufficient account the factor of deliberate choice which operates in cultural evolution.

I 1

Aesthetician Gillo Dorfles returns to the sort of motion discussed. by Professor Holton, and claims that the high and mechanically driven speeds to which twentieth century men are subject imperils their outlooks on the world. From the “un- natural” interruption of our “cosmic” rhythms “originates the trauma caused to the cellular or microcolloidal connections of [man’s] brain, and also the probable induction of states of consciousness and emotional pressures which are unfathomed and even dangerous.” Perhaps we might infer that seat belts may save our bodies, but only parking our cars and walking will save our souls.

Psychologists Hans Wallach and James J. Gibson contribute essays on the perception of motion. Wallach’s essay is straightforward, demonstrating that of the two causes of perceived motion, the observed displacement of an object in relation to oneself as an observer, and the observed displacement of an object in relation to another object, the latter cause (which can be explained as a change in perceived form) is the more influential. That is, the moon does move, but not in the way we seem to “see” it move against a background of moving clouds. Had Wallach wanted to relate this phenomenon to the arts, he might, for example, have discussed its possible employment as an artistic device in motion pictures. However, he did not.

In what may be the most interesting of the essays in NAM, James J. Gibson addresses himself to a more perplexing problem: how is i t that we perceive in-

It is not clear what one is to make of all this.


variance in objects (“constancy”) while all the while we receive a welter of varying sensations? For example, we approach an object and i t gradually fills our visual field; it may move or we may move it, yet we perceive it as the same and unchanging. Gibson reviews and points out the inadequacies in three familiar attempts to solve the puzzle: the notion that perceiving is more a function of innate ideas than i t is of sensations; that our perception of constancy is learned from prior receptions of sense data; and the Gestaltist notion that perceived constancy is a function of a spontaneous organization triggered by the nervous system. Gibson then proceeds to his own rather ingenious explanation of the phenomenon of constancy.

What constitutes a stimulus is a perceived change in a sensory presentation; a contrast or a movement attracts our attention. To see an object “from all sides” is to see it from many perspectives. Yet the result is not a chaos of perceptions but a perfectly orderly and completely reversible series of perceptions- what Gibson calls a “family of serial transformations.” Order or constancy in an object, then, “does not have to be imposed on the momentary stimuli; i t is already there in the sequential stimulus.” That is, the fact that our changing perceptions of objects change in an orderly way leads us to perceive the shapes of those objects as fixed and invariant.

Gibson then goes on to say that the “flowing array of stimulus energies” has two components: an invariar.t component in a transformation that carries information about the object, and a variant component that carries other information---e.g., about the relation of the perceiver to the object. When an observer attends to the invariants he “perceives objects”; when he attends to the variants, he “has sensations.” Thus the permanent properties of the external world-texture, edges, solidity, etc.-are specified by invariant properties in the visual and tactual stimulus flux.

The way in which Gibson has set up his problem makes it remarkably easy for the reader to follow his ensuing discussion. In his treatment of the standard solutions to the problem, he brilliantly combines lucidity with economy of means. And his own solution suffers from none of the defects pointed out in former attempts. Yet his solution is open to criticism from a t least one quarter which he did not mention.

For Gibson, “the environment is constant, the stimuli are changing, the sensations are changing, and the perception is constant.” But if, as he later argues, stimuli are changing by dejTnition (i.e., we discover that that to which an organism reacts is a change, and we shall call such a change a “stimulus”), then on what grounds is he able to say that the environment is constant? Or that the outer world “has” permanent properties, such as texture, edges, etc. ? Gibson appears to assume the existence of an unchanging environment, although the only evidence he could have for it would be his own perceptions of constancy. It would then appear that Gibson’s very perceptions constitute their own warrant of truth: i.e., if he perceives some x to be constant or invariant, then x i s constant or invariant. Thus i t appears that lying underneath and supporting Gibson’s very interesting argument can be found Berkeley’s familiar claim that “esse est percipi.” In order to deal with the objections that are likely to be raised against this point of view, i t would be of value to see Gibson’s essay expanded to include, in his discus-

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cussion of perception, the role of the perceiver’s own active and purposeful relation to what he perceives, and the relation between what he perceives and his understanding of the reports of other perceivers.

The eight remaining essays in NAM deal with aspects of the visual arts, broadly conceived. George Rickey and Katherine Kuh contribute informative and well illustrated discussions of kinetic art, covering the territory opened in 1921 by Thomas Wilfred’s light-projecting Clavilux, through Calder’s mobiles, up to Jean Tinguely’s mechanically driven machines, Len Lye’s oscillating rods, and Allan Kaprow’s happenings. Kuh remarks that “the more informal the new kinetic art, the more i t relies on the participation of its viewers, precisely as toys depend on the children who play with them.” Her fascinating analogy tempts the reader to push i t a bit further himself.

Hans Richter and Robert Gessner emphasize the importance of the effects of motion in the movies. Richter notes that anything that moves seems to tell a story, and Gessner shows how the story can be artistically treated through cut- ting, editing, and the moving of the camera or the subjects being filmed.

Art gallery director Gordon B. Washburn discusses the giant-sized frameless nonobjective paintings of the mid-twentieth century. If one may guess at what the relevance of his essay to motion might be, he seems to caution against exhibit- ing such paintings in such a manner that the viewer, as he moves through the exhibit rooms, loses a sense of their uniqueness and individuality. The reader or gallerygoer may seriously ask-although Washburn does not-how “individual” such paintings are, if only the ingenuity of a gallery director can keep him from confiising one with another.

In the concluding essay of NAM, architect and urban designer Donald Apple- yard focuses on the sequences of experience that are conditioned by people’s moving within and through cities. Appleyard argues that cities should be delib- erately designed to afford the traveller “moving encounters with the environment” that are pleasant, stimulating, and meaningful. It may be true that the crowded and disorderly American city is a dismal sight, but the ugliness is only sympto- matic of a far more fundamental political, economic, and moral malaise. To ignore the social problems of cities while speaking of urban redesign is the sort of nonsense one gets when i t is suggested that fingerpainting is the panacea for the problems of psychotics.

Two essays in NAM, those of Wallach and Gibson, have much to say about the perception of motion. But as a whole, the book has little to say about art and even less to say about motion itself. The arts that are discussed are only a small sample within the entire range of the visual arts. The essays of Rickey, Kuh, and Gessner afford valuable information about kinetic art and motion pictures, but a reader may wonder whether considerations of motion are irrelevant to the more traditionally conceived visual arts. One suspects that the concepts of motion and rhythm might be invaluable tools for the analysis and appreciation of a painting by Rubens, a sculpture by Myron, or any work of architecture. But this is not hinted at in NAM.

If there are fruitful relations to be drawn between motion as the physicist conceives it, motion as the psychologist claims we perceive it, and motion as the


artist presents it, they will have to be drawn by the reader himself, if he has the ingenuity and if he cares. For the essays in NAM stand alone, each isolated from the others, despite editor Kepes’ introductory promises about providing “possible connecting links among the various realms of knowledge.” One may also suspect <hat a reader interested in science will seek an understanding of motion elsewhere than in NAPVI. And a reader interested in art may be concerned with a great many other things besides the sort of motion discussed in NAM.

IV. We may ask, in reviewing all three of the volumes together, how well the aims

of editor Kepes have been fulfilled. Do we find in the books a “structure of structures” within which we can discover “a new sense of interdependence between knowledge and feeling” and the “common boundaries” between art and science? The answer is in the negative, for the search was misdirected from the start. Some of the essays, as already indicated, ’are worth serious consideration, but on their own grounds and not because of their relation to the themes of the books. Those themes are unsuccessfully pursued because neither art nor science are ever discussed in any way that might shed light on Kepes’ concerns. The science that appears in the essays is wholly given over to physics and physiology. Not a word appears in any of the three volumes about the sciences that are prob- ably the most relevant to both art and an increased awareness of associated human living: the social sciences.

Aside from architecture, the visual arts as they are traditionally understood receive hardly a mention. However one conceives of art, discussions that are limited to mobiles and nonobjective paintings place arbitrary and irrational boundaries on any attempt a t understanding the relation between art and other human concerns. For similar reasons, i t is likely that discussions limited to the visual arts will mis- represent the relations of all art forms to the other activities and interests of men.

The introductory essays to the three volumes are full of grandiose aspiration. Yet editor Kepes might simply have asked, “Can an understanding of the psy- chology of perception and the development of modern physics shed any light on the teaching and the understanding of contemporary non-representational art?” Of course, this question is far narrower than the original ones, and would be of interest to an audience much smaller than that for which the three volumes were presumably intended. Yet had it been asked, the forty-two essays could have been judged as being a bit verbose and a little disorganized, but nonetheless

Yet the discussions of art are even more barren than this.

suggestive. DONALD ARNSTINE, Department of Educational Policy Studies, University of Wisconsin

mid-century art: its scientific analysis and its role in education

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