Rethinking the forms of Visual Expression by Robert Sowers (review)

Leonard0 Reviews section includes rmiews of books,journals and other print publications, W products , videos and films, software and new technologies, conferences, exhibitions and other Pvents in thP field of art, science and technology. Additional reviews can Oefound in IRonardo Electronic News, Leonard0 Currents and theFine Art, Science and Technology (FAS71)electronic database. CHANGING IMAGES OF PICTORIAL SPACE: A HISTORY OF SPATIAL, ILLUSION IN PAINTING by William V. Dunning, Syracuse Univ. Press, Syracuse, NY, U.S.A., 1991. 272 pp. $17.95. ISBN: 0-81562508-1. Reviewed by RudolfAmheim, 1200Earhart Rd., No. 537,Ann Arbor, MI 48105, U.S.A. Dunning proposes to supplement the history of pictorial space in Western painting, which, he says, has concentrated unduly on linear perspective. He deals systematicallywith the perceptual depth effect of shading by the gradient of brightness and by the color gradient from blue to red and from red to blue. His survey also involves the gradient of color saturation and the difference between sharp and soft outlines. More technically, the development of oil painting is described as combining thick and thin paint and opaque and transparent paint with the perceptual differences between dark and light and warm and cool. Had Dunning limited himself to a monograph on these spatial matters, of which as a practicing painter he is an expert, he would have given us a most useful book. There are valuable references , for example, to Giotto’s controlling the different spatial saliences of the basic colors by varying their saturation (p. 30).Similarly,Dunning describes Tiepolo as the first modern colorist, who gave roundness to his figures not by the contrast ofdark and light but by the use of a warm side in opposition to a cool side of equal color saturation (p. 104). And there is an excellent chapter on de Kooning’spictorial technique. These and other useful observations are made by Dunning with the help of his diligent reading of the pertinent literature . His text is a compilation of innumerable citations, which alert his readers to the best sources. Since, however , every quoted author carries his or her own approach, the book adds up to a quilt of scintillating bits rather than to a coherently flowing argument. This is unlikely to bother the author, who admits that “our concepts and ideas are littered with parts and pieces-some well petrified, some warm and some still quivering” (p. 213); but it makes for bumpy reading. Dunning’sbook has another, more fundamental flaw. Being not only an artist but also an academic teacher (at Central Washington University), he aspires to supplying a succinct textbook of the history of Western painting. He therefore lards his text with derivative references to philosophy, politics and science, treating his readers to observations on Neo-Platonism, Marxism, Zen or Freud and making cross-connections between, say, Plato’s epistemological discussion of the three kinds of beds and Rauschenberg’s use of a bed as a canvas. This ambition clouds the book’s theme, a monograph on pictorial space,with constant references to topics whose relevance to the theme remains insufficiently explored. It also presents particular artists one-sidedly as though they had been mainly or solely concerned with pictorial space. It is useful to describe Masaccio’scontribution to naturalistic representation, but it is misleading to label him as “the shadow catcher” and to accuse him of deviating from his task by indulging in irrelevant subject matter. RETHINKING THE FORMS OF VISUAL EXPRESSION by Robert Sowers. Univ. of California Press, Berkeley, CA, U.S.A., 1990. 139 pp. Trade, $35.00;paper, $12.95. ISBN: 0-520-06632-4, tie7iinued by KudolJAmheam, 1200Barhart I % . , No. 537, Ann 4rbor, MI, 48105, u.s.A. Robert Sowers’sshort book is a most welcome manifesto helping us to find a way to reconcile a neat set of traditional categories with the bewildering intermixture of the artistic media facing us today. In aesthetics, we are used to squeezing the variety of artistic creations into three containers: painting, sculp ture, and architecture; but today’sart production presents us with hybrids that seem to spurn any such categorization. Sowers’suntimely death in 1990 has deprived us not only of a gifted stainedglass...