Parables of Sun Light: Observations on Psychology, the Arts, and the Rest

1969

1969 6 January I compared Pierre-Auguste Renoir's way of shaping foliage in two of his landscapes. In one of them he used a color scheme ranging from a green for the lighted sides of the trees to a dark blue for the shadows. In the other landscape, he modulated from green to a complementary dark red. It seemed to me that the volume obtained with the latter procedure looked complete, fully closed, whereas the gamut from green to dark blue made for an incompletely curved shape—as though only the completeness of the color range created a completeness of volume. 26 January Kevin Lynch mentions in his book on the image of the city that place names in the old Florence referred originally to canti, namely, to landmarks such as loggias or pharmacies or lights. Only later were the names attached to the streets. A similar system prevails in Tokyo, where the local names refer to small blocks of houses; street names are mostly the product of Western influence. It would stand to reason that originally streets were not ob115 jects but mere connections between objects and that only with increasing density of construction did the road itself become a string of habitations, worthy of a name. 30 January Da quinci innanzi il mio veder fu maggio Che'l parlar nostro, ch'a tal vista cede; E cede la memoria a tanto oltraggio.* (Paradiso 33.55-57) 2 February Apparently, Italian artists used the term pensieri to describe the first sketch that gave the general idea of the work, done, say, by a master to tell his disciple what kind of composition to develop. 4 February "On doit tendre avec effort a 1'infaillibilite sans y pretendre " (Malebranche, as quoted on the title page of Chevreul's De la loi du contraste simultane).* When around 1930 I wrote a book on film, the nature of the new medium made me start the presentation from visual reality and show in what ways the film image deviated from it. Some twenty years later, for my book Art anC. Visual Perception, I started from the elements of the medium, a black dot placed in a square. The former approach was that of traditional art theory; the latter derived from modern art's emphasis on the immediacy of * "From then on, what I saw went beyond what can be mastered by our speech, which gives in to such a sight; and memory gives in to suchexorbitance." * "One must try hard to be infallible but not pretend that one is." 116 PARABLES OF SUN LIGHT formal expression. One could also approach film theory the modern way, by taking off from a dot moving across the screen; but it would take some doing to reach, if only asymptotically, the mechanical recordings of the photographic image. One would be working against the grain of the medium. 7 February In the 1890s, when Freud revealed the manifestations of the unconscious mind, Melisande lost her wedding ring on purpose. 18 February What I learned from writing in German for so many years was not so much German as writing. I learned to write, which helped me immensely with my English. 2 March When Kandinsky had not yet abandoned all references to physical subject matter, one had to recognize the objects to see his composition correctly. I noticed that the lack of visible order is largely remedied as soon as one recognizes the buildings, the men on horseback, the roads, and the water. This made me realize that the shape of familiar objects contributes actively to the compositional pattern, for example, by creating depth where there would be little or none without the reference, or distinguishing objects sharply where little distinction is provided by the paint. This factor is likely to operate importantly in "painterly" styles such as that of the Impressionists: the artist, intent on color and light effects, can leave a part of the organization of shape to the images of the objects represented. Kandinsky's abstractions come beautifully into their own once he abandons the references to nature entirely. How is one to understand, by the way, that so imagina117 1969 tive a painter reduced his form to a sort of White Russian costume jewelry in the 1920s? Was this return to the decorative style of his beginnings his only way of responding to the formalism of the Bauhaus? The tantalizing threat created...