Words and Picturesby Meyer Schapiro

Leonardo

Words and Pictures by Meyer SchapiroReview by: Robert L. Brown, Jr.Leonardo, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Summer, 1977), pp. 250-251Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1573456 .

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typescripts has not produced the proceedings rapidly, nor cheaply. The book contains no index but does have numerous typographical errors.

Holography. M. Francon. Trans. from French by Grace Marmor Spruch. Academic Press, New York, 1974. 143 pp., illus. $11.00. Reviewed by Anait A. Stephens*

As an artist who has utilized lasers for light environments and reflection holograms, my review of this book is based on my practical knowledge of the medium. The book was first published in France in 1969. The English translation was printed in 1974. The final result is a compilation of the many aspects of holography. The author carries out a logical thought development, although there is some unevenness in the degree of extensiveness overall. One very good chapter is done on computer holography. The many good references to original research would be better placed at the end of each chapter rather than at the back of the book. The diagrams are visually difficult to comprehend due to the complex notation used. There are other holography books I find better diagramed for artists, such as Optical Holography by R. J. Collier, et al. (New York: Academic Press, 1971). Also there is an absence of photographic material. All in all, the format of the book falls somewhere between a journal and an advanced text. It is suitable for use as an intermediate college text in science. For artists who have no science background, this book will not suffice; but being used as class reading to back up the step-by-step process of making a hologram, the book would be useful.

The Aesthetic Animal: Man, the Art-Created Art Creator. Robert

Joyce. Exposition Press, Hicksville, N.Y., 1975. 143 pp., illus. $7.50. Reviewed by Desmond Morris**

This is a refreshingly unusual book on the subject of aesthetics, containing one huge, and previously under-stressed, truth, and one large, and curiously naive, distortion.

First, the author's great 'truth': it is that human beings, by their very nature, are artistic animals; that the arts are part and parcel of their biological inheritence. For so many people, the arts are seen as merely the froth on the beer of life, rather than the beer itself. This is a dangerous, post-industrial attitude that the author vigorously attacks, asserting that human cultures, everywhere, and in every epoch, have indulged in song, dance, decoration, construction and design. He goes even further. stating: 'We have taken it for granted that the human arts could not have appeared without the human beings who produced them. But the converse-that human beings could not have appeared without their arts-does not seem to have been considered.' He sees the arts as playing a vital role in the growth of the human brain: 'They ... unlocked his mind, and gave him his 'open sesame" to the world of culture.' He points out that other animals may use tools, but that tool-using for them has not been associated with great progress in brain-power: 'Art can account for the mentality behind man's consistent employment of tools, whereas the use of tools by animals that do not have the adaptive arts has not noticeably enlarged their mental capacities'.

Some students of evolution will not, perhaps, be too happy about taking the aesthetic factor as far as Joyce seems determined to push it, but there is no doubt that the human brain does have some very fundamental aesthetic urges and responses. In my book The Biology oJ Art (London: Methuen, 1962), 1 demonstrated that, even at the level of the chimpanzee, there is a powerful motivation to produce, organize and vary, simple non- figurative patterns, and that the apes might scream with rage if prevented from completing one of their pictures, just as if they were having food removed from reach whilst still hungry. At the human level, the aesthetic urge generally becomes so intensive that, even under social conditions of gross technological crudity and simplicity, there has been aesthetic ritual and display,

























*1685 Fernald Point Lane, Santa Barbara, CA 93100, U.S.A.

**Wolfson College, Oxford, England.







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personal decoration and adornment, complex singing and dancing, and elaborate painting and sculpture. Life in a tribal mud hut (when the struggle for physical survival is not overwhelming) has been anything but dull and muddy. Also, in more advanced cultures, following the agricultural revolution, there was active folk art among the peasantry to match the high art of the courts and the churches.

Only when one takes a hard look at advanced-technology societies does one see an apparent weakening of the aesthetic impulse-a sort of aesthetic 'blunting'. High Art still remains, with the Oil Barons replacing the Royal Barons as its patrons, but folk art seems to be withering in the growing shadows of the high-rise blocks and the thickening clouds of exhaust fumes. Here and there, a little fossilized peasant craft, or carefully preserved folk-dancing, still can be found, but this is not the active, growing aesthetic expression that one might expect from a large human population. The contemprary arts, in the main, have become specialized pursuits, confined to the rarified air of galleries, concert halls and theatres. Joyce is justifiably angry about this fall from aesthetic grace of the populace. He rightly demands a return to a more aesthetically active life style-what he calls an 'aesthetic revolution'.

Whilst I agree with him about this need, I dispute his explanation of the cause of the problem. His villains turn out to be the 'dirty' capitalists and the bourgeoisie, who, it seems, are responsible for taking art away from the 'lovely' masses. This is the naive distortion I mentioned at the outset, and it is a pity that it mars this otherwise stimulating book. It is not an error, merely a half-truth, and perhaps all the more dangerous for that, because it more easily obscures the truth. The reality of the situation, as I see it, is that it is mass production, as a new, basic social process, that is the cause of aesthetic 'blunting'. More people experience art today than they ever did-they hear more music, see more pictures (in motion, now) and generally take in a larger dose of varied aesthetics than at any previous period of history. But at the same time they make less art themselves than before. The technique of mass production and mass media have replaced the participatory aspect of mass aesthetics. Millions are merely passive onlookers. If this is the fault of the evil of commercialism, then it is also the fault of the masses who watch and buy.

If, instead of launching into the jarring, hackneyed phrases of political jargon, Joyce were to examine the social processes that underlie the problem, he could provide a much more convincing final chapter to his book. Perhaps his bias is caused by living in New York City. If he were to study the condition of the contemporary arts in Moscow, he might find that, even in the absence of capitalists, a post-industrial society still suffers from severe aesthetic shortcomings, when compared with our ancestors at Lascaux and Altamira. The modern dilemma has nothing to do with left-wing or right-wing political con- siderations. It stems from the massive increase in population size, combined with the advance of technology to a point where people can be serviced aesthetically by machines, which press out endless bits of coloured plastic for them. This process is independent of ideology. As a result, aesthetic urges remain unsatisfied and dangerously unfulfilled. Or do they? Joyce detects rumblings of revolution and so do I. There is rebellion against stereotyped ugliness-even if the results are no more than spray-paint graffiti on public walls, or the embroidered decorations on denim jackets-and there is a heartening sensation that, beneath the grimy surface of the urban, industrialized world, the heart of the ancient, aesthetic human is still beating firmly.

Certainly, this is a thought-provoking and exciting book, and Joyce is to be congratulated on his timely outburst.

Words and Pictures. Meyer Schapiro. Mouton, The Hague, Netherlands, 1973. 108 pp., illus. Paper, $8.00. Reviewed by Robert L. Brown, Jr.+

It may at first seem strange that medieval biblical illustrations take such apparent license with the texts they depict. All distort






















IDept. of English, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, U.S.A. IDept. of English, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, U.S.A. IDept. of English, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, U.S.A. IDept. of English, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, U.S.A.



The individual studies show the five relatively minor artists working in a period of transition, a period to which too little attention is paid, but which, through the work of artists such as Stuart Davies and Arthur Dove (who was working in the area of non-figurative art as early as 1910), shows the inception of 'modern' art in the U.S.A. well before the work of the New York painters of the 1940's. But in this book the cartoonists remain minor figures due to their detachment from the mainstream of activity in art and even to some extent from politics.

The Art and Peoples of Black Africa. Jacqueline Delange. Trans. from French by Carol F. Jopling. Dutton, New York, 1974. 354 pp., illus. Paper, $5.95. Reviewed by John F. Povey**

This is an unrevised translation of an important detailed study of African art published in French nearly 10 years ago. In many fields, pioneer studies are respected for their originality while they inevitably become outdated by more recent scholarship. Modern studies of non-Western art and society have vigorously challenged many accepted truisms of the colonial period, and notable advances have permitted more elaborate and accurate knowledge of African history and more precise recognition of the arts. Inevitably, significant new studies by major scholars in the U.S.A., such as Thompson and Armstrong on the Yoruba or Bravmann and Ottenberg and Cole on Ghana, were unavailable when this book was conceived. The epilogue (the only new addition) acknowledges that 'a great deal of new research has been undertaken', and admits that the only alternative to simple reprinting would 'really amount to writing a whole new book'. Yet, in spite of this distinguished scholarly industry, the writer does not feel that such research requires any modification of her basic thesis or philosophy. 'The point of view remains as valid and necessary as it was in 1967.' I question this.

Delange's approach is fundamentally anthropological. She accepts as a basic premise that an aesthetic is only possible within a prescribed social context. This localized culture must be apprehended if there is to be any enjoyment of the art itself. Ignorance of the nature of a society or the religious function of an actual work of art would preclude appreciation. The idea raises very complicated issues, which become most sharply pertinent when they concern the so-called primitive arts. One may well be unhappy about the requirement that one amass a plethora of information deemed essential for an adequate response to a work of art, yet the alternative idea of some universality of appreciation is liable to be a dangerously sloppy justification for aesthetic admiration of the caliber of the vintage: 'I don't understand it but I like it.' Without thrashing further into this dark jungle of aesthetic theorizing, Delange's determined espousal of the anthropological explanation does provide her with a very obvious structure for her book and allows her to provide substantial quantities of informative data in a relatively simple framework.

The general arrangement is geographical. Each 'people' is allowed a brief history. Customs are described as they reflect or demand the art forms characteristic of a region. Her determination has been to attempt 'as complete a stylistic inventory as the present state of documentation would permit'. Her concern for 'material documentation, writing' is under- standable and yet remains Europocentric. Recent historians have found that the absence of written texts does not preclude the investigation of a nation's history. But her determination rests elsewhere, less in an art history itself than in the material she provides for this task to be undertaken subsequently. In the words of Michel Leiris' preface: 'Rather than being a history of black African plastic art this book... comprises the data for such a history.'

In a sense, the most significant part of this book is her conclusion, because it is only by escaping from the fairly basic cataloguing and explanation that constitutes the main sections that she advances the underlying philosophy that has sustained her work. For this it is necessary that she invent the term Ethnoaesthetics; defined as 'the sociology of art in the civilizations without writing'. It is in this section that she worries













significant details, omitting what seem crucial parts while often adding idiosyncratic elaborations. The strength of Schapiro's monograph is that he defines an order in this apparent chaos: the license is illusory; all textual interpretations-and these illustrations are simply visual representations of textual interpretations-must go beyond the literal meaning of the text. No biblical text completely encodes its meaning; texts are, rather, vestiges of meanings that an interpreter-armed with (at least) linguistic and pragmatic rules or conventions and culture-specific facts and beliefs-must complete. The illustrations, then, represent constructed meanings of biblical texts, meanings that are, moreover, more often allegorical or analogical than literal. Schapiro's work could thus contribute to both hermeneutics and iconographical theory. The evidence from three centuries of medieval art illuminates traditions of biblical interpretation while his commentary on the interpretations illuminates the generic conventions of representation.

But Words and Pictures is not a theoretical work. Schapiro alludes to rich theoretical problems and provides acute iconographical analysis, but the book remains a traditional historical iconographical study. Focussing in the central two chapters on one biblical type: the story of Moses and the Amalekites, he explains the variation in representation that results from different political, psychological and religious influences. His central point in this section is important: the biblical text-in fact, any text of this kind-will support many interpretations. More precisely, these texts can be known only through interpretations and Schapiro shows how these visually presented interpretations are determined by the cultural contexts from which they come.

Those requiring a coherent body of material to investigate verbal interpretation or iconography will find the book immediately useful. Theoreticians in both fields will be excited by the problems he poses. But they may also feel that these theoretical matters are insufficiently examined. Words and Pictures tantalizes one by asking what a reader does in forming a textual interpretation and how visual and verbal thinking are related. But neither answers nor programs for investigation are offered. Although the book appears in the Approaches to Semiotics series, it is more an organization of material than a systematic study.

Art and Politics: Cartoonists of the Masses and Liberator. Richard Fitzgerald. Greenwood Press, London, 1974. 254 pp., illus. ?7.75. Reviewed by Malcolm F. R. Miles*

This book, Fitzgerald's first, provides detailed, interesting biographies of five cartoonists (U.S.A.) of the first half of this century, a sound piece of research adequately recorded and provided with useful footnotes. But the issue of 'art and politics' is mentioned only in passing. K. R. Chamberlain, for example, was prepared to illustrate anything for anybody, as opposed to Robert Minor (1884-1952), a Communist Party worker, who was arrested as such in 1948. But their styles are not especially different. Likewise John Sloan (1871-1951), in some ways a follower of Robert Henri's Ash Can School, displayed no clear connection between his cartooning and politics. Maurice Becker also provides no reason to study the issue through his work except that, amongst other things, he produced cartoons for a radical magazine. Only Art Young (1866-1943) consciously chose cartooning as a vehicle for his political ideas.

The author could have described the broad context of pre- World War II isolationism in the U.S.A. and the Regionalist art that characterized that political stance. But he does not set the five cartoonists into the general art scene, despite the connection of Sloan with Henri, the impact of the Armory show (1913) and the activities of Stieglitz and his '291' gallery, and he ignores the debate between a native realism and an innovative art largely imported from Europe. At a time when artists from the U.S.A. studied in Paris and there was even an American movement (Synchronism) that developed in the cubist-orphist milieu, the relation of the new ideas in art and those in politics was a significant issue and, hence, is a serious omission in this book.













*Dept. of Art History, West Surrey College of Art and Design, Falkner Rd., The Hart, Farnham, Surrey GU9 7DS, England. *Dept. of Art History, West Surrey College of Art and Design, Falkner Rd., The Hart, Farnham, Surrey GU9 7DS, England. *Dept. of Art History, West Surrey College of Art and Design, Falkner Rd., The Hart, Farnham, Surrey GU9 7DS, England.

**African Studies Center, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90024, U.S.A. **African Studies Center, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90024, U.S.A. **African Studies Center, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90024, U.S.A.

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Words and Picturesby Meyer Schapiro