Les Fondements topologiques de la peinture by Fernande Saint-Martin (review)

instantly captivated by specific works of masters of non-figurative art. But perhaps no one ever is. However that may be, Bigras's easy style, poised between the confessionaland theconversational, entertains so charmingly that it would be churlish to disagree with him. (FRANCIS SPARSHorr) Femande Saint-Martin. us Fondements topologiques de la peinture Collection Constantes, no. 40 Hurtubise HMH '980. 184. $9.50 paper Fernande Saint-Martin uses Piaget's researches into the development of the spatial conceptions of children as a weapon against conventional art education. A child's drawings cannot properly be described in geometrical terms but show the growth in his mastery and use of such topological concepts as proximity, differentiation, and sequence. These relationships are later combined into projective schemes that articulate his experience of the world as ranged around him and his sense of how various viewpoints can be experientially co-ordinated. All the complex spaces thus developed are continuously meaningful as they explore the ways in which the self is related to the not-self - a relationship that, Saint-Martin says, it is the sole function of art to explore and affirm. But at the age of ten or twelve all this comes to a sudden end. The child ceases to draw spontaneously and is compelled to substitute for his own vital spaces the impoverished, Euclidean space of vanishing-point perspective , inherently meaningless and full of emptiness, suited only for the presentation of 'images' that are neither experientially relevant nor cognitively valuable. Contemporary non-figurative art is based on the development of the child's spontaneous topologies, which are our only way of humanly integrating ourselves in our worlds, so that the domination of the educational system by deadly Euclidean abstraction blinds ordinary people to contemporary art and at the same time condemns them to alienation. Saint-Martin's argument will not convince anyone who is determined to disbelieve. It is not really made clear why vanishing-pOint perspective is an unmixed disaster - the author herself admits at one point that topographic and geometric relationships can be manifested and explored in the same complex work - or how atmospheric perspective is related to analytic geometry. The affinity alleged between child art and contemporary adult art seems to rest on no more than a decision to apply the same style of description to both. And the imputation of monolithic philistinism to contemporary theory and pedagogy suggests that the author knows little of recent aesthetics and is imperfectly informed about today's classrooms, in many of which linear perspective is so far from being an imposed orthodoxy that students complain that no one will instruct them 492 LEITERS IN CANADA 1981 in it. In fact, the book should be read as a polemic and not as a treatise. Never mind the shaky arguments and the dubious evidence. The author's approach is original and invigorating, buttressed by incisive criticisms of some fashionable views and backed by a wide and deep knowledge of the visual arts and their history. It is a book to be taken to heart. (FRANCIS SPARsHorr) ).E.H. Macdonald. J.E.H. MacDonald Sketchbook, '9'5-'922, a facsimile edition. Introduction by Hunter Bishop Penumbra Press '979. No pagination. $9.95 paper Thoreau MacDonald. Notebooks. Foreword by Ray Nash. 'Note on the Text' by John Flood Penumbra Press '!)Bo. 21B. $14.95 paper 0.). Firestone. The Other A.Y. Jackson: A Memoir McClelland and Stewart '979. $lB·95 All of the three books under review could be described as annotations on the achievements of important and prolific careers, whether by the artists themselves (in the form of sketches, writings, or comments recorded by interlocutors), or by those documentinl( their doings and sayings. Yet only lately has such vital information been treated with any significant degree of scholarly respect. John Flood, in his 'Note on the Text' of Thoreau MacDonald's Notebooks, remarks that MacDonald called 'the preliminary drawings' made for book illustrations 'notes,' and from them he worked up his final line drawings. The selection presented by Penumbra Press includes both finished ink drawings and the more immediate pencil and wash sketches. These are interspersed as vignettes among extracts from correspondence and journal entries...