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BOOKS SHADOWS: THE DEPICTION OF CAsT SHADOWS IN WESTERN ART by E. H. Gombrich. National Gallery Publications, London, 1995; distributed by Yale University Press, New Haven, CT 06520, U.S.A. 64 pp. Reviewed byHarry Rand, National MuseumofAmerican Art, SmithsonianInstitution ,Eighth and G Sts., NlĀ„, Washington, DC 20560, U.S.A. From time to time the National Gallery has invited prominent artists to roam its collections and gather from its rich holdings a demonstrative group of works into one room. A slim and beautiful volume accompanies the first such exhibition to be assembled by an art historian-Eo H. Gombrich. The event took place in the Sunley Room at the National Gallery, London, April-June 1995. The sumptuous number and quality of color plates in this little book of but 64 pages, the crisp, cool and heavy paper used, the care in every aspect of its production-all are further honor accorded to Sir Ernst, who gleaned these works where formerly only practicing artists were allowed. Gombrich ranged through art history, from antiquity to photography, from the Orient to Impressionism. From such variety , a pattern develops with a few consistent visual mechanisms, which he describes . Gombrich considers the shade created when something interrupts light flowing toward another plane, the gradual diminution of light upon an object's surface by which we adjudge the source and intensity of the illumination and an object's form, and a shadow that ties things to their spatial position by touching the object and another surface . Byexamining these three species of shadow Gombrich opens a new vista into art, as much darkness as light. He invites us to roam through art history mentally, and any large museum literREVIE \t\TS ally, to gauge the treatment of light, and the implicit assertions thereby made, about the solidity of objects and what exists beyond the picture, perhaps casting a shadow into it. His brief inquiry leaves our sight refreshed by unconventional possibilities of looking and our reason invigorated by a new scale of judgment; we are reminded that shadow's presence or absence is a meaningfully diagnostic component of art, wherever it is encountered. The book is so brisk and lively that readers are consoled at having missed the exhibition. Beside the delight Gombrich enlivens in his reader, all else is quibble, but a cavil or two should not be taken amiss as a blemish or demerit, only evidence of the dialogue and thoughtfulness that Sir Ernst seeks to enliven. His assertion "that we must never assume that artists did not see what they did not paint" is pure rhetoric of the most spurious kind, as phenomenological perception is hardly the issue (unless we want to ask, wearily yet again, whether El Greco was astigmatic); it is hard to believe what he infers. The absence or presence of shadows really does describe norms ofviewing the world, various from time and place, conventionalized, information-rich-but not because they report on phenomenological perception : Egyptians did not see the world as flat cut-outs, although they so portrayed it. Nor is complete relativism warranted . Changes in reporting about light's activity in the world really do calibrate the station of various societies regarding their relationship to materiality , even morals, and certainly science. The very hallmark and distinction of occidental art is its treatment of cast shadow, which, Gombrich eventually concedes, was a threshold crossed when "shadows re-entered the repertory of painting" after centuries of neglect, not after centuries of being unseen. Such points well aside, students and amateurs are well served. For all non-art-historians this pleasant book will find its place as an invitation to reconfigure the galleries of paintings through which they walk, whether actually or mentally. AT HOME IN THE UNIVERSE: THE SEARCH FOR THE LAWS OF SELF-ORGANIZATION AND COMPLEXITY by Stuart Kauffman. Oxford University Press, New York, NY,U.S.A., 1995.321 pp. $25.00. ISBN: 0-19-509599-5. Reviewed by RogerF. Malina, CenterforExtreme Ultraviolet Astrophysics, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, U.S.A.Email :. Recently I reviewed, very favorably, John Holland's book Hidden Order, which describes current work in the science of complexity and artificial life. So...

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