Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Author(s): E. M. Hafner
Source: Comparative Studies in Society and History , Oct., 1969, Vol. 11, No. 4, Special
Issue on Cultural Innovation (Oct., 1969), pp. 385-397
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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Hampshire College
on the tangible environment, in spite of the fact that I love nature very
much.'
Statements of this kind gather strength from a variety of aesthetic
doctrines, the most common of which suggests that the painter avoids
imitation of nature by emulating something else, something that is
presumably subjective and abstract in its very essence. We are urged, for
example, to accept music as a model of the arts:
It is almost impossible to state any theory of the abstract in art without resource to
the terminology and the parallel of music. For music is a wholly non-representative
[sic] art based in its physical aspect on certain widely understood phenomena. The goal
of the abstract painters is an art of color as free from associative and objective interest
as is this other art of sound.... Painting must be stripped of the trivial and extran-
eous elements that give rise to the pleasures typical of drama, anecdote, photography,
etc.'
1 Sheldon Cheney, A Primer of Modern Art (New York: Liveright, 1958), p.159.
2 L. A. Hiller and R. A. Baker, 'Computer Cantata: A Study in Compositional Method',
Perspectives of New Music, Fall 1964, p.65.
Mourning the retreat of modern art from the world of sensible experience,
these critics (many of whom are artists as well) express a view of the matter
that is widely shared by laymen. Putting aside those who regard most of
current art as a rude and expensive hoax 'manipulated by appraisers',
many thoughtful people of our time find themselves unable to give serious
attention to modern trends in painting. The artist seems-and often
claims-to have left the real world behind him in a search for the meaning
of his own complex subconsciousness. Scholarly jargon, with such terms
as analytical cubism, geometric constructivism, and abstract expressionism,
carries frightening overtones of a discipline that has contracted into an
austere and private domain.
I wish to begin a study of this situation by pointing to the striking
similarity between the layman's view of modern art and his view of
modern science. Here, for example, is a statement about science:
Our twentieth-century world, with its swift technological and scientific advances and
socio-economic upheavals, our century which has witnessed the rapid shrinking of
the world's dimensions, is obligated to give its children a view of science which reflects
these changes. Yet today the average man, who may occasionally be led to cast a casual
glance in the direction of abstract science, still sees it as a mental challenge that is both
revolutionary and startling-at times irritating and aggressive, and at other times
meaningless or merely innocuous and inoffensive.5
Does this not express in familiar terms the impasse between layman
and scientist? It is, in fact, a statement dealing with abstract painting; I
have merely changed a few words, substituting science for art. The lay-
man looks at both of these esoteric worlds with confusion and dismay,
puzzled and intrigued by the insistence of the experts that something of
enormous significance is taking place beyond his ken.
What seems to disturb a layman most about abstract painting is its
3 Paul Hindemith, A Composer's World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), p. 43.
4 Gyorgy Kepes, 'The Visual Arts and the Sciences', in Science and Culture (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1965), p. 148.
5 Paraphrase from Michel Seuphor, Abstract Painting (New York: Dell Publishing Com-
pany, 1964), p. 7.
Bertrand Russell has expressed the idea that an abstract view of the world
is the only one possible: 'Physics is mathematical not because we know
so much about the physical world, but because we know so little. It is
only its mathematical properties that we can hope to discover.' And
Eddington tells us that, in studying the physical world, we are only
studying ourselves:
... we have found that where science has progressed the farthest, the mind has but
regained from nature what the mind has put into nature. We have found a strange
footprint on the shore of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after
another, to account for its origin. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the
creature that made the footprint. And Lo! it is our own.8
There is nothing in nature that is not in us. Whatever exists in nature exists in us in
form of our awareness of its existence. All creative activities of mankind consist in the
search for an expression of that awareness.9
Examining the past from the vantage of contemporary historiography, the historian
may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with
them. Led by a new paradigm, we adopt new techniques and look in new places. Even
more important, during revolutions we see new and different things when looking with
familiar techniques in places we have seen before. It is rather as if the professional
community had been suddenly transported to another planet where familiar objects
are seen in a different light and are joined by unfamiliar ones as well. Of course, nothing
of quite that sort does occur: there is no geographical transplantation; outside the
workroom everyday affairs continue as before. Nevertheless, paradigm changes do
cause us to see the world of our engagement differently. In so far as our only recourse
to that world is through what we see and do, we may want to say that after a revolution
we are responding to a different world.11
... only for purposes of comparison; only in the exercise of his mobility of mind.
Only in the sense of a freedom which does not lead to a fixed development, representing
exactly what nature once was, or will be, or could be on another star. But in the sense
of a freedom which merely demands its rights, the right to development as flexibly as
nature herself.12
This idea-that the motive for studying existing knowledge is the develop-
ment of intellectual mobility-is of course a scientist's principal credo
as well, and Klee's advice may apply with equal force to the scientist in
contemplation of artistic image.
Do the graphic images themselves, emerging from laboratory and
studio, betray their scientific or artistic origins? In most cases they do:
visual clues in enormous number and variety lead us to a quick decision.
There is no way of confusing Leonardo's anatomical sketches with the
Mona Lisa, even though the portrait contains a strong element of physio-
gnomic analysis. But it is an interesting and incontrovertible fact that the
newest images of science and art are easily confused except by very special
eyes. An observer attuned to Japanese prints and unaware of X-radio-
graphy might most comfortably see a radiogram of a lily as a delicately
idealized sketch from life, and many microphotographs might strike
almost anybody as abstract expressions of free artistic imagination. Let us
suppose that such a microphotograph were included without identification
12 Paul Klee, 1924 speech at Jena, reprinted in Modern Artists on Art (Englewood Cliffs,
N.J.; Prentice-Hall, 1964), p. 88.
Gyorgy Kepes, who has already been represented here with the remark
that much of modern art is a 'popularity contest manipulated by ap
sers . . blind to the fundamental role of the artistic image', neverth
sees a profound but misunderstood relation to science:
Because our modern specialization so often separates artist and scientist, neith
fully aware of the profundity of the other's work. Both reach beneath surface pheno
to discover basic natural pattern and basic natural process; yet the scientist ex
the artist to interpret literally and the artist expects the scientist to think mechanica
Pevsner's view is shared by many artists who speak of 'pure art', 'liberation
from value', 'denaturalization of matter', and 'ideal invented objects'.
The tone of such statements is often cranky and defensive, suggesting
13 Leo Steinberg, 'The Eye is a Part of the Mind', Partisan Review, 20, 194 (1953), p. 194.
14 Naum Gabo, 'The Constructive Idea in Art', in Modern Artists on Art, op. cit, p. 105.
15 See note 4.
16 Gyorgy Kepes in The New Landscape, op. cit.
17 Robert Schenk in Kunst und Naturform.
18 From a 1957 conversation with Antoine Pevsner, published in Aspects of Modern Art
(New York: Reynal and Co., n.d.).
Some of the painters themselves, even when confronted with such examples
involving their own work, hold to their doctrinaire abstractionist positions.
One of the most striking comparisons in the Basel exhibition showed
almost identical compositions of aspartic acid crystals on the one hand
and a constructivist painting by Camille Graser on the other. In response
to an inquiry about the influence of science on her work, Miss Graser
has written us a statement of which the following is a part:
The exhibit in Basel was a surprise. The parallels could not have been presented in a
more beautiful fashion; the world of the microcosm was fascinating. In the beginning, I
feared misconceptions and a confusion of principles of art. In all of my work, which is
'constructive-non-objective', there exists no dependence on the tangible environment,
in spite of the fact that I love nature very much. My concern in painting is the forming
of a new reality. My work is based on elements of form and number, and on the
19 See note 10. 20 Ibid.
analyzed light of the spectrum. Thus, stimulus from the microcosm is unthinkab
it would mean an erring deviation from my theory and would put upon me the
of a renegade naturalist. I believe that the newly won consciousness rests on the re
tion that the discovery of scientific truth on the one hand, and the creations of mod
art on the other, represent continual and searching advances on two dramati
opposed paths.21
It might at first seem that this positon is tenable only if the artist's role
is consciously didactic, aimed toward showing us how the new reality of
science can be brought within a comfortable visual compass. But to
accept this premise is to vitiate the idea, especially if we take the artist
at his own word. Gabo may insist that 'the same spiritual state propels
artistic and scientific activity', but he speaks for a tiny minority. Ranged
against him are the multitudes of Pevsners and Grasers, not to mention
the majority of art theorists and the entire apparatus of public relations
21 Translation of a letter from Camille Graser. I am indebted to Susan Presswood Wright
for her assistance in soliciting this statement.
22 See note 17. 23 See note 13.
But since the discovery that nature herself is not quite symmetrical, it is
tempting to turn the idea around: 'We might. .. think that the true
explanation of the near symmetry of nature is this: that God made the
laws only nearly symmetrical so that we should not be jealous of His
perfection!'