Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics by Frank Wilczek and Betsy Devine (review)

maries, together with the fundamental shapes ofverticality and horizontality , a means of transcending the appearances of nature. It was their way of proceeding beyond the sensory world to the underlying essentials of all existence. Understandably, this created a problem. It threatened to convert the most direct components ofcolor vision into a grid of intellectual abstractions -a fear expressed by Barnett Newman in a statement quoted in Burgi's book. Why, Newman asked in 1969, should he associate himselfwith the purists and formalists who burdened red, yellow, and blue with a mortgage by transforming the colors into ideas and thereby destroying them as colors? He decided not to be deterred, that led him to put the challenging question: Who Is Afraid of Red, Yellow,and Blue? A further complication of our problem deserves to be mentioned. From the beginning, neither in practice nor in theory can the colors of the triad be said to have been treated simply as equals. The color yellow, in its precarious relation to the splendor of light and gold on the one hand and the dirtiness of earth on the other, has played an uneven part in the history ofWestern painting-a problem that has never been systematically explored. Then again, red has often been endowed with a special function. In Aguilon's diagram, reproduced by Burgi, red appears at the center, flanked between black and white by yellow and blue; among the three secondary mixtures, green faces red as central between golden and purple. In our own century, Kandinsky based his color system on the duality ofblue and yellow, which stands for the poles of coldness and warmth, while red hovers somewhere in between . The two polar colors compensate each other to create the immobility of green. This approach is clearly influenced by Goethe, who based his color system on the opposition ofyellow and blue, "the only two completely pure colors we know". The two fundamental colors are "heightened toward red",just as their mixture creates green. This leads Goethe to the "spiritually significant" difference between the heavenward move toward red and the correspondinglyearthward move toward green. For a similarly minded contribution to the metaphysics of color we may return to Mondrian, who stated that yellow and blue reach most effectively into spiritual depth, whereas red-the product of their intimate union-is more superficial. Whatever we are willing to make of all this, it does serve to remind us that the foundations and interrelations of color amount to more than a play with visual sensations. THE BRUSH AND THE COMPASS: THE INTERFACE DYNAMICS OF ART AND SCIENCE by Paul Z. Hartal. University Press of America, Lanham, MD, U.S.A., 1988. 341 pp., illus. Trade, $29.50. ISBN 0-8191-6847-5. Reviewed l7y David Topper, History Department , University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Manitoba, IDB 2£9, Canada. The aim of this book, as stated in the preface, is to show "that art and science interact in the conscious and extra conscious levels, and that they can be integrated into a synergistic whole" (p. x). Although I have strong reservations about such quasi-mystical statements, some may applaud these aims. But few will benefit from the execution. Hartel purports to speak of synergy , but puts together six di~ointed and disorganized essays. The result is a potpourri of random facts and misinformation . Although there is an original essay on the aesthetics of the Montreal Metro and some interesting discussion of the psychologist Adelbert Ames, not much is new here. The book is largely a shallow summary of material from other works, such as E. H. Gombrich's Art and Illusion .The slipshod nature of this book is revealed, for example, in several figures depicting the Muller-Lyer illusion (pp. 145-148); in both cases the parallel lines are not the same size, which undermines the 'illusion' of the illusion. The sloppiness of the figures is then reflected in the reasoning. This weakness is exposed in the first chapter: "The Creative Process: Newton and Constable". The exposition on Newton is a superficial overview of Newton's life, with a few minor historical errors. There is little of the 'creative process' explained, except for a reconstruction of...