Picasso’s Guernica by Anthony Blunt (review)

Books-Liures 111 panied by a decoding process that transforms them into either verbal expressions or into images. The code is unique for each individual and depends on the individual’s personal history. Art and Understanding by Derek Clifford is a collection of ideas and judgments on art, which sometimes are only slightly linked together. In the first part of the book, the author attempts to fill the criteria for judging a work of art by considering man confronted by reality. He discusses sensations, particularly, but not exclusively visual sensations; the synthesis that the mind makes of diversesensationsand the role ofprevious experience in sensation. In the second part of the book, he discussesthe elements of aesthetics without apparent connection to the ideas discussed in the first part. Hepursues the debate onthe nature of the ‘beautiful‘ that began in ancient Greece. I can only conclude that this book is meant for those in search of ways to appreciate art. It is ofless interest to the professional artist. Jacques Mandelbrojt Le Bastidon 13-EguillesY France. Visual Illusions. M. Luckiesh. Introduction by W. H. Ittelson. Dover Publications, New York, 1965. 252 pp., illus., $1.50. This is a reprint, unchanged, of the charming book by Luckiesh, first published forty-seven years ago. Your reviewer read it some thirty years ago and has now re-read it with enjoyment. Thestudy of opticalillusionshasa curioushistory. Early Greek architects were well aware of some of them, as demonstrated by their use of entasis in their columns and such ideas persisted to the Middle Ages. However, the modern scientificstudy of the subject can be considered to have been begun more or less about 1850. From then until the beginning of the twentieth century there was much study of geometrical optical illusions by physicists, physiologists and psychologists, and indeed some hundreds of papers were published. The interest seems to have died off a lot but has now revived considerably. This book by Luckiesh, which first appeared in 1922, has had a lot to do with the revival. It is of course dated but well worth reading. For Luckiesh, who was an illumination engineer, produced a most readable review of many of the curious findings of the nineteenth-century psychologists. By its very character, the book is addressed to the layman. There are preliminary chapters on the mechanism of vision and then by page 45 the author plunges into the first of his notable geometrical illusions, that of a vertical line bisecting a horizontal line of the same length. Many of the illusions illustrated are striking, some are weak. The text is filled with page after page of excellentillusory diagrams. Actually your reviewer believes that a viewer’s residual uncorrected 8 astigmatism can have a very marked effect on the strength of the geometrical illusions shown but Luckiesh had not recognized this. Very little attempt is made to explain the many curious geometrical illusions demonstrated. We arepresentedwith thefait accompliandleftbemused. There is considerable interest today in dynamic illusions, those which depend either on eye movement or object movement and those which lead to pattern flicker. In this book this is hardly touched upon, except perhaps once or twice. As Luckiesh was a lighting engineer, he includes a chapter on this, one on the illusion of the grandeur of the moon and one on painting, iiicluding curiosities in picture framing. Your reviewer does not find these three chapters as stimulating as the others. The last chapter in the book, on camouflage, is clearly due to the fact that the authorwaswriting in 1920,just after the impact of camouflage in the 1914-1918 war. This isjust a good book to read and well worthy of being brought out as a Dover reprint. S.Tolansky Dept. o f Physics Royal Holloway College Englefield Green, Surrey England. Picasso’s Gueniica. Anthony Blunt. Oxford University Press, London, 1969. 60 pp., 31plates in black and white, incl. one large fold-out plate of ‘Guernica’, 25s. In the first few pages, Anthony Blunt evaluates Picasso’sposition in the art of the twentieth century, describing the painter’s particular genius,his virtuosity , his traditional tendencies and eclecticism. The latter falls into two kinds: a direct borrowing of formal vocabulary...