Stained Glass Craft by J. A. F. Divine and G. Blachford, and: How to Work in Stained Glass by Anita, Seymour Isenberg, and: Glass-Works: The Copper Foil Technique of Stained Glass by Jennie French (review)

Books 34I very guts and it has long been a ‘body’art, since the body is not taken as just a habitation for the mind and spirit; the three aspects are considered as a whole, as hinted at by the poet T. S. Eliot. Thus, a Japanese ceramicist will feel and look deeply into the opaque, black, rough surface of a tea bowl, lovingly handling, weighing it, as if ‘tasting’ and ‘grasping the whole’ from his belly. I think Marden’s work can only be grasped in some such way. His is a return, I feel,a profound return to wholenessto the body. This, it seems to me, is his significance. Quantum Realism: An Art of the Techno-Nuclear Age. Mahmoud Sabri. Obtainable from the author. Raffaelova 1990/3, Praha 10-1oo00, Czechoslovakia. 1974. 96 pp., illus. Paper. Reviewed by Peter Lloyd Jones* It is unfortunately true that the less obviously figurative (and hence, less related by chains of association to previous historicallyaccepted art subjects)artists’ works are, the more artists feel the need to justify their works theoretically. So much SO that a lot of contemporary art depends for its appreciation on its interpretationsin art magazines. Qicanfum Realism is an odd book, even odder in this context. Taken in isolation, it is quite incomprehensible, but then so are the writings of Mondrian, Kandinsky, Malevitch and others. What is odd about it is its origin and timing. Sabri is a painter of the hard-edge stripe kind and his book is at once an account of his working procedures and an historical justification of the results. Like his predecessors mentioned above, he believes that the inexorable movement of history has propelled him and his art on to the world stage. Historically determined inevitability puts the works beyond subjective judgment (either that of the artist or of its viewers). It becomes thereby ‘real’. Sabri’s world spirit is, alas, not for me of the rather engagingtheosophical variety, but is rather that perceived by Hegel and Marx. It focuses attention on tool-making technology and instrumentally-aided physics as prime modes of relating man to his environment. The first section (rather bravely, in view of the later illustrations that look to me as rather standard non-figurative art) commences with a page allocated wholly to a slogan from Brecht-‘the Barbarians have their art let us create another’! It is devoted to kitsch history-a quick run-down in Hegelian terms of art history from Lascaux to Cubism, with lots of nice dialectical contrasts (subjective/objective, objectlprocess, etc.). These are summed up in a table that shows correspondences between paintings and what has gone before (macroscopic realism). What then is new about his art? Sabri is interested in quantum mechanicsand, in particular, the quantum mechanical account of simple atomic structures. He uses the numerical values of a certain selection of atomic spectral frequencies that happen to fall within the visible range to select a vocabulary of basic colours from the available range of artists’ paints. A little (quite arbitrary) manipulation enables the ‘bandwidth‘ of the painted stripes to be related to the overall electromagnetic energy of the spectral frequencies chosen. This is, perhaps, as good a way as any of organizing colour stripes. It is less capricious than many, but in what way can it be said to be ‘real’? It bears no serious relation to a thorough-going visual diagram of atomic structure that might be useful in a textbook. It is too subjective and oversimplified for that. Only spectral frequency/ energy seems of interest to Sabri, yet artists’ colours are not monochromatic but have variable saturation and brightness. How do these latter variables, so vital for the perceived appearance of a colour, bear any determinate relationship with atomic structure? And if the casual reader were to assume that Sabri is perhaps a scientist doing a little amateur art on the side, he would nevertheless be puzzled by the fact that the painting *Kingston Polytechnic, Knights Park, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey KTl 245, England. corresponding to water (H,O) is made from the separate atomic spectra of hydrogen and oxygen and not from the molecular spectra of the combination. And what...