The Spirit of Colors: The Art of Karl Gerstner ed. by Karl Gerstner and Henri Stierlin (review)

Books 155 careers as painters but because they considered the graphic impact of their publications as significant as the verbal content. C. Douglas approaches this topic by tracing the ideas of the poet Kruchenykh and the painter Kazimir Malevich to the explosion of new scientific ideas at the beginning of this century. There are also two good comparative essays on Russian and Italian Futurism. John Bowlt, who has almost single-handedly brought early 20th century Russian art to the attention of the European and American public, has contributed an artistic biography of the painter Pave1 Filonov and his “theory of analytical art”. This raises the question, however, of the appropriatenessof using the term “Futurist” to include a broad spectrum of approaches to the graphic arts and literature. While Malevich and Filonov shared many political and aesthetic views with their literary Futurist coevals, they largely fought their aesthetic battles on their own. This was particularly true of Malevich, who moved to pure abstraction about the same time that his literary friends were declaring the “self-sufficiency of the word” in poetry. It would therefore have been more helptul, and more correct, to treat Futurism as one of several manifestations of modernism afloat in the period immediately before and after the Revolution than to try to fit the views of artists as different asMalevich and Mayakovsky into this procrustean bed. Again, the lack of an introductorydiscussion shedding some light on Tuturism’s relations to other modernist movements such as Expressionism, Suprematism and Constructivism is felt. The anthology fulfills a need by bringing together selections in English of severalmembers of an important 20th century literaryand art movement, but it is neither representative nor comprehensive. The photographs and reproductions at the end of the book are often more illuminating than the texts themselves. For a more thorough understanding of Futurism, at least in its pre-Revolutionary form,there is still nothing better than Vladimir Markov’s 1968 study, Russian Futurism: A History. A Century of Light. James A. Cox. Rutledge, New York, 1978. 224 pp., illus. $17.50. Reviewed by Richard I. Land* Here is a remarkable ‘birthday card’; a sumptuous way to mark a century of electric lamps and the place of the General Electric Company in that history. Many early photographs and documentsarereproduced along with first hand reports of Edison laboratory activity. The text bristles with facts and tales about the development of modern lighting. Care and attention is given to ordering the details of the story, tagged with dates. The technical details are often overshadowed by historical views, personal issues, and business intrigue. Here is resource to delight anyone interested in why and how electric lamps came into their ubiquitous current use and variety of types. The subtitle, “The General Electric History of Light” impliessome of the difficulties in this project. A company-supported biography must flatter the sponsor-of course, much of the story is worthy of pride. But one side of history leaves one wondering about the competition. Westinghouse and foreign efforts are mentioned, but objectivity is necessarily compromised. Facts and issues are not distorted, but unique contributions not incorporated in G E efforts are either missing or lightly treated. Who in England really sparked the fluorescent lamp development in the early 1930s? This sort of omission is not really a problem in the earliest years, since almost all lamp development was the G E story, or of companies that became part of GE. The book is part systematic history of business and technology, and part scrapbook of anecdotes, vignettes and proud achievements. Actually, the production decisions, personalities and investments provide one story line that weaves back and forth in time and emphasis across the line of invention, research and technical realization. There is abundant evidence for the vital role research has provided through the hundred years. It’s significant that the Schenectady Laboratories were the first devoted to basic research for an American industry. While perhaps eclipsed in these days of microelectronics and quantum optics by Bell Labs, the G E labs are a proud second in prestige. The final chapter devoted to the ‘bricks and mortar’ story of Nela Park seems incidental to the lighting story in...