Ineradicable falsity

Color in ancient sculpture

24 04 07 Æ32  16.62g  axis 12h.  Copper drachm.  Egypt, Alexandria.  Severus Alexander, laureate, "draped and cuirassed bust from behind" (surely with the aid of other specimens!)  Rev., bust of Serapis, with ornamented kalathos; palm at r., date L I (year 10) at l.

Also supplied by the dealer, who, I'm sure is right, "Köln --Dattari 4439; Milne 3043l Ennett 3174"

Late in the 19th century, when Greek independence was well established and new excavations and firsthand study by both Greek and transalpine scholars became very important, not least because photography and in due course color lithography led to broadly distributed publication of new finds and ideas, in the non-specialized press and in popular books great emphasis was given to the put-down of sculptors who, like Canova, had made their statues white and poets like Keats whose Grecian Urn was of white marble (that urn, of course, was part of the neo-classicism of the Augustan age).  Of course, Canova, when he first saw original Greek sculptures is said to have cried, Oh, if only I could begin again!
Inevitably, since the idea of an all-white Greek world was patently ridiculous, the popular press began exaggerating and generalizing the use of color.  As recently as the 1980s I found a freshman-level history textbook asserting that the Parthenon was red: you could see its traces.  When writing for or lecturing to students who might not be in another course on ancient art, especially if they were working for degrees in Nursing or Accounting or Economics (or any other that left little room for elective coursework), it is inexcusable that the author paid to produce the textbook and the lecturers allowed to regurgitate it did not wonder about the rusty color of the Parthenon, which is due to the amount of iron in Pentelic marble, and of a hue quite different from the genuine paint-traces of red and blue and green that do exist.  What is worse is that similar false platitudes now are copied and pasted, from out-of-copyright sources, or second- or third-hand from such sources, on the internet.
Coin collectors usually encounter some of the primary evidence for statuary, especially cult images, that were richly colored and so are led to read the ancient sources that describe their color and rich materials, sources that were, of course, always available to those who were interested.  So, invited to contribute to Numiswiki in Forum Ancient Coins, I wrote a brief article summarizing that evidence.  There you will find the principal texts for the statues at Alexandria and Antioch, illustrated by the coins that show the details of the decoration most emphatically.  I also can show you one of Antioch with that same Sol-Serapis image where only the patterns on the garment are not quite so emphatic:

And, at the head of this post, for the headdress of Serapis at Alexandria, a lovely big bronze of Severus Alexander, dated to the tenth year of his reign (222–235), the most evocative portrait of this last of the Severans that I know.  The kalathos (basket) headdress of the Serapis, with all its figure work, also is reproduced, not always exactly alike, in most of the sculptured replicas of that famous image, of a god that because almost as important as Zeus himself, and sometimes subsumed Hades as well, as came about easily given his Egyptian heritage.  Of course, Clement of Alexandria's description leaves no doubt as to the rich color in mixed media of that image.  And, we must add, such statues did not of course stand outdoors, any more than the Virgin Mary at Seville does.
Yet these big cult statues in mixed media (not to mention chryselephantine work with pieces of gold and ivory mounted on a wood and metal armature / framework, such as the Zeus at Olympia by Pheidias) are exceptional.  What about color used more routinely?
Following Egyptian usage, Greek sculpture in wood or limestone was usually sealed with gesso and painted with encaustic (or anything other than plain water-based paint).  Pigments with egg, for example, or honey were available, and naturally also beeswax.  As for a fine icon, the gesso surface was carefully smoothed.  As soon as color was added to give emphasis to the details in architectural orders, it was important to use mineral pigments and a medium that would adhere to marble (limestone temples, of course, were coated with fine marble-dust stucco to protect them and provide a surface for color) and withstand weather.
Now, in the seventh century BC, a whole limestone statue might be wholly painted.  The little "Dame d'Auxerre" now in the Louvre was so painted, but the poster-paint colors used on top of plaster of Paris in illustrations purporting to show the use of color are misleading.  Not that such statues weren't bright, but they would have had the brightness of a fine Byzantine icon or of Duccio's Maestà altarpiece.
The statues that actually preserve quite a lot of original color, the Korai from the Athens Acropolis, have it on their hair, eyes, mouths, details of their garments.  They did stand in the full sunlight of the Acropolis and, no matter how good the paint, owe their preservation of it to their having been buried less than a century after they were set up.  If most of the traces of paint are red, that is because the other pigments were less permanent, not that ancient Greek girls had red hair and eyes!

Athens, Acropolis #679, the Kore wearing a peplos, c. 530 BC

The Kore from Keratea in Berlin, often called a Goddess, of c. 580, does have a wholly red garment (not the same red as, mixed with black, made brown hair), but that must be because she had died unmarried, and was set up dressed as a bride, like the Kore found in my own lifetime, Phrasiklea, a funerary statue, found with her own epitaph that informs us that she died still a maid, though of marriageable age.  Greek brides wore red.
How soon, if ever, Greek statues of deities and mortals had blank eyes, even if the beauty of marble came to be more and more valued for its own sake, I do not know, but even the portrait of Caligula in Copenhagen has the eyes of a living person, and, at the other end of the empire, eyes were given a glint of life (and one in Berlin preserves colored inlay in that carving) with drillwork, and hair was often painted.  Of course, the artists who worked for the Roman upper class were usually Greeks themselves.

*****

So, what prompted me to write this essay and call it "Ineradicable Falsity"?  I was opening my mail and having a MacD cherry-berry drink when a man, easily about my own age, came by my booth and caught sight of a brochure I'd just opened from the Hixenbaugh Gallery in NYC.  On its cover is a statuette, just over a foot tall, of Aphrodite Anaydyomene, with dolphin support, and a quite good one for a statuette, obviously a nice cabinet piece and probably datable to the Late Republican period as the dealer suggests, since the very popular late-Roman statuettes of deities do not preserve such proportions or such delicate nudity.  Needless to say, it has no paint, perhaps never had any, since at just that dating one expects the sort of classicism that makes whiteness one of its ideals; still, this statuette lacks its head, and, frankly, I'd expect an Anadyomene to have color to her hair and to her eyes, at least, and a bit of color would set off the dolphin nicely.

Anyhow, the man who saw her just as I took the brochure from its envelope, immediately expostulated that the Greeks always painted their sculpture, that "we" (speak for yourself, sir) were wrong to think they didn't, that all those temples were gaudily painted, that he was a philosopher who lectured on the Greeks, and so on.  After trying to qualify his assertions (especially about a Parthenon with red columns), to no avail, and he kept saying that the experts who knew all agreed with him, I just decided to be rude and identified myself as a classical archaeologist.  He said, well, he was a philosopher and had read everything for himself.  He really didn't seem to be drunk or high on anything, merely to hold a century-old and always ill informed package of unexamined popularizing.  

Indeed, there is something ineradicable about generalizations and simplifications that are felt to be éclatants or even impressive.  There was nothing the man said (sorry, he didn't introduce himself) that I haven't heard and read over and over.  Just like the Sunday School paper that talked about the whoredom of Corinth that tried to tempt ancient sailors...

Is there no cure for talk about "the Greeks", "the Romans", "the Americans", not to mention "the liberals", and the rest?  Why does the infinite variety of humanity and human history always need to be ruthlessly reduced so as to be disposed of?

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

My post last year shows that I could not be surprised to learn that Fischer-Dieskau died on May 18.  It will take me weeks to play through even half of the recordings that I own.  I hope he did realize how many of my generation owed half of their musical education to him.  For example, would I have known to obtain, one by one, the whole Graham Johnson Hyperion Schubert had I not already known at least half of the songs and by that time collected Hans Hotter and Heinrich Schlussnuss and Elizabeth Schummann and many other singers, too?  It is impossible to list them all.  All the pianists, too; not only Gerald Moore.  Not every adept pianist is a great accompanist, with half of the composer's work in his hands.  It is not merely keeping up with the Erlkönig!  The Brahms and Wolf songs (as Daniel Barenboim observed of the latter, which he recorded with F-D) demand great musicianship.
I must henceforward respect Thomas Hampson even more highly for what he wrote yesterday on Fischer-Dieskau.  I almost always agree with Barenboim, anyway.
As usual, the Guardian has the best assessments (in my opinion).
But, I had to write to a friend, his death is like a colophon to a half century, to the decades in which I could feel that I was still growing.  And, like Fischer-Dieskau, I am keenly aware of cultural change.  I must tell myself every day that my loss of élan vital does not mean that civilization is moribund.
I have never read his memoir.  Now I shall.  I shy away from reading memoirs and biographies of the living.

Non-fiction for the elderly, or the very young?

A delightful history

Our first phone: I was new then

Thinking of two dear friends, one in technology, the other retired, as I am, I should like to recommend as delightful and informative reading Jon Gertner's The Idea Factory, which I just finished reading on my Device.

I don't know whether this will most delight those who can remember most of it or those who have toiled in assorted Idea Factories themselves.  Naturally, since I still find avocado-green phones slightly distasteful, I am writing this one all in black.
Walter Isaacson's review in the Sunday NY Times is good, of course, but the greatest pleasure of the book, for me, was in all the details (as of the making the Telstar satellite, to name just one).
I confess to a lifetime fondness for the big acronyms, such as NASA, JPL, LANL, et al., but especially for the Bell Labs, and, by extension, even for the memory of Ma Bell as a whole.  I had a childhood friend whose father worked for Bell, and I think for the Labs, who had a telescope, whose radio was components (and that c. 1944) rather than a piece of furniture, whose knowledge, when we both were age 10, awed me.  A neighbor later played for me a piece composed on a computer, which had been fed 18th-century Counterpoint, that produced a piece that sounded worse than a theremin (a primitive electronic instrument that you merely did not touch and which produced only a melodic line) but that did indeed come out with a real fugue, as I recall, which significantly was musically correct but not musically memorable.  As an adolescent and young adult, I lived across the Bay from Silicon Valley, and lots of people were full of interesting conversation.  I remember first hearing a transistor radio in Greek Mani, before they even had electricity or running water there; I saw CNN first in 1982 in the village café near the Early Neolithic site of Nea Nikomedia, where they were discussing what shortly would be called AIDS; they had a satellite.  One evening after dinner in Old Corinth we sat looking at the sky as one of the early Russian satellites passed, blinking at us, overhead.  But then, persons of my cohort also remember the first direct transmissions of radio and TV programs wirelessly.  And hundreds of other things.
Is it just grief at the thought of Greeks' suffering today or the anguish of USPS that make me remember feeling as if the world had come to an end when Ma Bell was divorced from all her spouses (if I may call them that)?  Why was the breakup of Columbia so much more painful than almost any other accident?  You may think of your own to cite.
Yes, there is nostalgia.  My first phone call was from my grandparents' phone number 972-M (no dial at all, to a live woman at the central), the letters M, J, and R (the three I remember), like the Able, Baker series, chosen because unmistakable.  See the picture, from when I was 2 months old?  No dial.  But the telephone was already far from new, of course.
What I did not fully understand was the true importance of transistors.  And like John Pierce I deeply believe that it is security in basic research that is more important than almost anything else (so the "acronyms" needn't be perfect).
The book is very well written and fully documented.  You'll enjoy it, I think.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

On the Educational Establishment and its Critics

Today I heard a discussion, almost a robo-documentary, because it was unchanged since the first time I heard or read it, on a National Public Radio program, "Talk of the Nation", which is usually less unintelligent.
So I will break my resolve not merely to opine on current events in these Essays.
For a half century I taught children at every level, and also knew other children in and out of my family, who learned to read slowly and with difficulty.  My most varied experience was while I taught as a Sister in an Episcopalian teaching order.  That dyslexia is varied and real I know very well; besides, I had experience with children who came to our school (Grades K–12) with English as a second language.
I was astonished and shocked to hear the same old arguments in favor of promoting to the next grade or 'keeping back' (as one said then), those who could not read at the end of Grade 3 (most usually, since at that point reading must begin to be used seriously to manage other subjects and understand instructions).
Of course, school districts that can afford them offer tutoring and other remedial programs, but no different  considerations were discussed.
There wasn't even any consideration given to the use of computer programs to let students who needed to get the presentation of, for example, science problems or 'word problems' in arithmetic by hearing them read aloud through earphones or 'buds'.
More gravely, there was no discussion at all of alternative structures of elementary education that do not lock-step all the subjects of the curriculum to the Grades, year by year.
Not only do many schools inspired by Maria Montessori place children flexibly, but I recall observing a school in Berkeley, California, nearly half a century ago, which, observing (it is common knowledge among teachers) that growing children progress variably in verbal and in arithmetical and in spatial and mechanical understanding, with some slow readers or non-readers being quick and advanced in other subjects, had all the children, though age-grouped for homeroom and part of social studies, placed just where they needed to be, for so long as they needed to be, especially in the fundamental verbal and mathematical skills.  Nor did they stay locked in a particular placement.  As soon as the appropriate level was reached, say in decimal fractions, for example, children could move on to another level or category.  And verbal and mathematical expertise could be applied to classification, explication, and quantification of natural sciences.
Now, that's not revolutionary.  And it needn't be more expensive than locked-step Grades and all the problems, and even tragic outcomes, that go with them.
One teaches children in all their variety if one wants a nation of educated adults.  I don't mean that great scientists and philosophers and artists can be made, but to make adults literate and to help children to keep their self-respect while learning as their varieties of mental growth demand does seem to be the only thing that really matters in elementary education.
There.  I won't talk about this again.  But I have taught so many teenagers and undergraduates who are scarred by bad elementary education, and I have been told by any number of very intelligent, even brilliant dyslexics, about their hell in the primary grades, that I thought about this all day long.  N.B.: I'm not even venturing to discuss graver learning difficulties; dyslexia alone is not so hard that a good tutor cannot help with it.

Gombrich, Popper, and Eric Kandel's book-2

This is the obverse die of a 28mm coin for the Danubian (Moesian) mint of Nicopolis ad Istrum when Auspex was governor, probably about AD 195-6.  The 'pit' in the center is an artifact of manufacture, and the roughness on the emperor's neck is corrosion.  The coin is made of brass.  For its relevance here, see at the end of the essay.

On the incorporation of art and science
In the first half of this essay, I only wanted to emphasize the importance of realizing that Klimt and Freud (and Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hoftmansthat, too) were of the generation that began with frank romanticism, so that their initiation into the Modern was different from that of their disciples.  It was different to have been born in the late 1880s or the 1890s.  I think of these cohorts in terms of my own family generations, different as the latter were, as the generation of my grandparents.  Here I want to emphasize the cohort of my own parents, born in the 20th century but before the first World War.  Resorting to my favorite musical composers, I think of it as the generation of Benjamin Britten (Franz Lehar's Das Land des Lächelns  certainly was later, but he was born in 1870).  It is also the cohort of Ernst Kris, of Ernst Gombrich, and of Karl Popper, whom I think of as the last group unlikely to have been radically affected by the second half of the 20th century and all its miracles, from penicillin  to radar to Facebook, although Popper died only in 1994.  This is that generation of my own parents with which I seem to find a special affinitiy.
Now, Eric Kandel himself is younger still, only five years older than me (though I admit the importance of his having spent his childhood in Vienna), only a year older than Shirley Temple, three years older than Queen Elizabeth II, four years, indeed, younger than Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (you will pardon me for naming persons who at various times seemed important to me).  Even so, I do understand why he did not want to wait interminably to publish his new book.
The latter half of the last century was that in which electronic technology not only came to permit universal social media and blogs like this one but real-time scans of the living brain, so that the question is whether so far they have provided the evidence that Gombrich still lacked for visual creativity on an empirical basis.
I would not mention the several legitimate meanings for "Style", if it were not so obvious that many writers seem to use the word without awareness of its different uses:
a) For regional traditions, such as Celtic style, Hopi style, Transcaucasian style, et al.
b) For the style of major art historical periods, as usually framed, such as Antonine style, Byzantine style, Romanesque style(s), Northern Renaissance style, Mochica style, Post-Impressionist style, and many more.
c) Personal style, such as Pheidias, Praxiteles, Donatello, Titian, Gentile da Fabriano, the Master of Flémalle, Georges de la Tour, and all the rest down to today.  The Manner of a known artist also may be cited.  A personal style is often securely identified also when the artist's name is unknown (I am quite sure that the die-engraver of the coin at the head of this post had a name; it is a remarkable fact that the names of artists of the Roman Empire, even of large works, are mostly unrecorded).
As Popper and others have pointed out, though quibbling over hair-splitting definitions is pointless and even delusive, being aware of the colloquial uses of common words that one uses is important.
Now, concerning personal style, what it is and what makes it:
The Language of Style
We might speak of the Meaning of style, but my intention is to differentiate iconic meaning, communicating graphic signifiers, from the forms and marks communicating what only the visual as such can communicate or, in music, what only audible forms can communicate meaningfully, just as only mathematical written forms properly communicate mathematical ideas and only the written and oral forms of the words and syntax of can do for verbal language: even the best marble urn, such as the Medici Krater (which was, I think, the one that Keats had in mind) is no substitute for Keats's Ode, and the Ode does not mean much of what the Medici Krater intended, either.  Because in Art and Illusion itself, even Gombrich (who certainly knew the difference) largely focused on the rôle of creating illusions of light and space, it is that book's examples and discussions that also dominate Kandel's.  Yet, between the lines of his text and in his TV appearances, one knows that what only the visual language itself can say conveys to Kandel what it truly means to him (else, why the labor of producing such a book?).  And it is at least as intellectual as it is emotional.  Sir Thomas Beecham's quip, that most people don't really like music but only the way it sounds, reflects his impatience with the multitudes who buy albums of nothing but adagios or nothing but flute music or guitar (for example), because these persons tend actively to resent instruction in the forms of music (especially Classical but increasingly also Jazz).  Some minds, evidently, do not get the full range of meaning from many composers; Brahms comes to mind (hence the title, "Aimez-vous Brahms?", though meant somewhat playfully).  Persons who want to skip right from loving Beethoven to hating Wagner and serial music, tend not even to mention Brahms.  Similarly, many people like pictures mainly as illustrations of stories that they know or make up or, less so, as a sort of catharsis for scenarios that they fear.  Very likely, pictures of men or women in erotic situations appeal to them not much differently from hotel-room porno channels on the television set.  This is not to say that erotic content is insignificant or even, per se, naughty.  Only, how good it is depends on how great the artist was who made it.  Similarly, which I find distressing, many tourists visit the ruins of the hospital at Arles because that is where Vincent was mad—and similarly for other artists and writers.
The Personality of Style
Writers, not to mention museum tour guides, persist in calling personal style a miracle (OK in the Latin sense but not as meant promotionally and not as usually understood in religion, for that matter).  The same may be said of Greek thauma.  Great personal style, whether in a poet or a painter / sculptor / architect..., is rare.  It is valuable, valuable to all who get its meaning, valuable in its power to convey what matters about the time or place it belongs to (Parthenon, Pantheon, Hagia Sophia, Chartres, S. Andrea al Quirinale, Tour Eiffel, "Falling Water"...not to exclude any others), though sometimes their real value becomes obscured by ballyhoo.  To me, it is indifferent whether the artist's own life was interesting to anyone but himself or herself.  Studying ancient art, I am easy with masterworks that are anonymous.  Their actual personality, for want of a better term, is undiminished by their anonymity.  And, by the way, that buildings are executed by contractors and masons and artisans and technicians of many other kinds, that coins are struck, that intaglio prints are often made and published by printers, that bronze statues are cast in foundries and not always finished by their creators, has nothing (or precious little) to do with their originality.  Admittedly a stock bust of a philosopher made for a private or civic library, come down to us in copies turned out in commercial ateliers and often retouched and polished for country houses or libraries in post-Renaissance times, may have lost much of whatever artistic power the original may have had: I do not have a very high opinion of that bust of Parmenides that I used as a heading for part 1 of this post, and that is why I looked for a real coin portrait for part 2. This is perhaps the best place, too, to say that, in my opinion, Sigmund Freud's collection of antiquities bespeak his interest in them as signifiers (rather like things in dreams) rather than works of art as artists, such as his wonderful grandson, Lucian, would understand the word.  The usefulness of mentioning Lucian is that his personal way of painting is the most important, not the fact that he painted nudes, not without erotic content (more than the internet images suggest).  Nor was Lucian Freud, in my opinion, primarily self-expressionist or realist or any other label; rather, it's all in his painting (that is not a statement that a philosopher like Popper would approve of, but it's the best I can do).  It's just as with Vincent van Gogh: it's the painting that matters; he knew that, he wrote about it in his letters.  Edward Weston 'speaks' in his photographs, irrespective of what he was working on with his camera, with his visual mind.  For great photographs are just as unique to their makers as great paintings or etchings.
The corollary
The corollary is that not all viewers, not all readers, not all listeners have the same gifts for learning everything possible from visual, nor from verbal data.  From the latter, the brain takes in auditory, visual, and other data, which, as Damasio and Kandel explain are assembled, interpreted, and stored as memory.  Each brain, and so the mind created in each of them, does this analogously, barring neurological issues, according to the whole mentality that is first innate and subsequently formed by diet, society, family, and so forth (too much to guess, or to list).  Inasmuch as much more intricate, it is much more personal than, say, the fingerprint.  It also is much more intricate than handwriting or than the unique forms that each person's speech makes of the language(s) learned.  I often have wondered about the minds that are possessed, so to speak, by the history of art or even by plain connoisseurship (say, for a big auction house).  I have guessed that they are both innately and culturally conditioned to be more or less equally verbally rational and visually rational.  Yes, visual thought, visual reasoning, like mathematical or musical thought, is rational, though its reasoning can be made verbal (in all these ) only to a very limited extent.  BUT NOT-VERBAL DOES NOT EQUAL NOT-RATIONAL!  I should guess that the emotional and rational component is comparable in the the verbal and the visual and the musical (folks say that mathematical language is almost purely rational, but mathematicians do not behave as if it were).  I guess that art historians are not quite artists and not quite writers, but that is a rather simplistic sort of logic.  Of one thing I am confident: to say that n is a great mathematician and that n' is a great artist are equally reasonable statements in terms of what we may one day know about the behavior and economy of the human brain.
Meanwhile, we seem to be stuck where early psychiatry was: almost all the serious experimentation has been done with sufferers from limitations: agnosia, autism, and the rest.  It is intensely interesting and important, but, like Freud's famous cases (more Viennese than not, more female than male, more middle class than either aristocratic or poor, more born at the end of the 19th century than not...) they are neither representative nor exhaustive.
The experimental neuroscience of the last quarter century is not nearly enough.  That is why I have relied on the same kind of reasoning, based on a lifetime of whole days in museums and cities, whole semesters of poring over pictures and pots and coins, and in the evenings coming home to listen to a lifetime's accumulation of recordings on shellac, vinyl, and compact disks, collecting as many as three dozen performances of a single song cycle or of sonatas or quartets or cantatas, as one always did.  One must understand why one comes to treasure some of them far more than others, why one can name a particular performer or quartet in most cases, even if the performance in question is being heard for the first time.  Initially, one suspects that the first ones that one heard will remain favorites, but no, only to a limited extent, that of fondness, in most cases.
I have never understood how anyone can have taken seriously the van Meerghen fakes purported to be Vermeers, for even five minutes.
As for that coin portrait of Septimius Severus, at the head of this page, dating from the end of the second century of the Christian era, when, as Alois Riegl pointed out, the tradition of more than half a millennium of representing in low relief the sense of a solid head (or figure) existing in light and air in space, is seen to be slipping away, not to be fully re-embraced and re-created until by Donatello and Desiderio, and of course we don't really know what Septimius looked like.  Yet even by unknown die engravers such as the one who worked for Auspex we can see the illusion perfectly realized.  In one more generation, even for the aristocratic Gordian III, though we have beautiful contours, the illusion is nearly abandoned, and in another half century, under the Tetrarchs, figures are like cut-outs on cookie sheets.  The explanations for this (not due to any incompetence) are many and too complicated to be rehearsed here.  If you can read Riegl's German, it's in Spätrömische Kunstindustrie, or you can read Otto J. Brendel (a beloved professor at Columbia University), Prolegomena to the Study of Roman Art (not that he rehearses Riegl in any detail, but it is an essential book, in any case).
If only I may live long enough to learn much more.
P.S. Yes, Chinese art has its own realization of visual illusion, which is independent of that in the West.
P.P.S  Yes, I neglected to dismiss Riegl's governing concept of Kunstwollen, though his analyses of the formal changes remain instructive and valuable.  It was the latter that helped me to accept Late Roman Imperial art in its own terms.

Florence, Uffizi.  The Medici Krater.  The likeliest candidate for Keats's "Grecian Urn".  This one is very Augustan Neo-Attic, that is, intensely Neo-Classical, although the statue of Artemis is less so.  It lives very happily in a gallery with a great Andrea del Sarto altarpiece for company.  The black-and-while details give better resolution, but this shows the whole great vase.

References:
(1) The proper title of the little exhibition catalogue, which may be hard to find, was Viennese Expressionism 1910-1924  The Work of Egon Schiele, with work by Gustav Klimt and Oscar Kokoschka (organized by the Committee for Arts and Lectures of the University of California, Berkeley).  University Art Gallery, February 5 through March 10, 1963, and Pasadena Art Museum, March 19 through April 21, 1963.  The text by Herschel B. Chipp is pp. 7-15, the plates illustrating the catalogue, pp. 22-55.
(2) The sites found by Google for Karl Popper are numerous and varied.  I found those from Stanford and the University of Michigan most informative: http:/plato.stanford.sedu/entries/Popper/  and cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notabene/popper.html
See also www.stephenjaygould/org/ctri/popper
(3) Though I do not recommend it (because it is muddled), I did publish an essay on Style (but see the last paragraph in its note 1) in Corinthiaca: Studies in Honor of Darrel A. Amyx (edited by Mario a Del Chiaro and William R. Biers), University of Missouri Press, Columbia, 1986.
(4) On the obverse dies made for Pollenius Auspex of Septimius Severus at Nicopolis ad Istrum, see
my own web page,  http://www.forumancientcoins.com/ayiyoryitika/Auspex_Dies.html   The obverse shown here is no. 2.

Gombrich, Popper, and Eric Kandel's book-1

Just the stock portrait type of Parmenides, but that was Popper's soubriquet for Einstein

During my first year at UC Berkeley I picked up the name of Karl Popper, but no more, probably mostly in Philosophy 6b, which I took with Professor Karl Aschenbrenner, from whom I learned not only the elements of Philosophical Analysis (Hospers' textbook was then new) but to value a teacher who was by no means a showman; I wanted to get what he was talking about, so I learned to sit in the center of the room and near the front, and I learned to pay attention.  Need I add that, despite (or maybe because of) the fame of "The Open Society" I did not get around to reading Popper.  It was a little like the famous film, "The Seventh Seal": everybody talked about it and had opinions and interpretations.  Those of you who know Popper will have suspected already that my dislike of babbling interpretations would endear Popper to me, once I got around to reading "Unended Quest" and "The Logic of Scientific Discovery".  My enchantment with the attrait, reading whatever I am drawn to, in whatever order I wish, remains unabated, and, having just listened to an interview with Google's Sebastian Thrun, I have his endorsement for how to live a good Retirement.  How I wish I could join in his Udacity, but I hope my blogs may offer some germ of his attitude to any who care to follow them.

But no, it was trying to find out when I had first seen drawings and paintings by Egon Schiele that made me read Karl Popper.  It might have been Gombrich, who like Hayek in London was Karl Popper's friend, and whose books I knew, but it wasn't .  Kandel, "Vienna 1900", illustrates more Schiele than I had seen since the show in the old temporary art gallery (once a boiler house, as I recall) at UC Berkeley, but when was that?  I searched every shelf and hanging file in the house until I found my copy of Professor Herschel B. Chipp's article in the catalogue for the show he brought to California; it was in 1963.  Luckily, I hadn't lost that catalogue.  Chipp's article is excellent.  There were several works in that show that belonged to another Popper, named Hans (I have not been able to learn whether he was some sort of cousin to Karl, but I found nothing, so even if he was it wouldn't matter, except that the coincidence had prompted me to find out what I could and download three books onto the Kindle).  Somewhere, too, I must have the large catalogue brought home from a big show that I saw later in Olbrich's famous Sezzession museum, I guess in the early 1980s.

The upshot was that I had to re-read Gombrich's Art and Illusion and read it more thoughtfully.  Kandel put me onto Gombrich's teachers, Ernst Kris, Emanuel Loewy, and Julius von Schlosser, to whom, behold!, Art and Illusion is dedicated.  No wonder Kandel could rely so heavily on Gombrich; theirs (with Helmholtz before them) were the studies that were epochal at the beginning of the 20th century.  Popper comes in because in The Logic of Scientific Discovery he had discussed the epistemology of Gestalt theory.  But right down to 1976, when Popper's Unended Quest was published, and 1972, when Gombrich wrote his Preface to the latest printing of Art and Illusion, brain scans could add nothing much that was new about the living brain.  I was relieved (though I felt silly about careless reading) that Karl Popper had not collected Schiele.  Even his taste in music was conservative (if late he added Chopin to Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven I suspect it was because of Gödl).  In Unended Quest, 1976, Kindle loc. 3595-8, he said:

“I personally have only vague visual imaginings; it is usually only with difficulty that I can recall a clear, detailed, and vivid picture before my mind (It is different with music.)  Rather, I think in terms of schemata, of dispositions to follow up a certain “line” of thought, and very often in terms of words, especially when I am about to write down some ideas…”

and all his writings are consistent with this insight.  By this time, he knew that Gombrich did think visually and could understand visual sketches—not just optical illusions!  Even Gombrich, however, who did appreciate Klimt and his disciples, was stymied by Jackson Pollock's work of the 1950s.  Now, Kandel is not really an art historian, though his appreciation is not confined to subject matter (he likes the erotic figure studies but knows intuitively, I think, that the style is essential to conveying the intensity of Schiele's life).  That is why I turned back to Chipp for the extra-Viennese connections.

For me the approximate birth-dates (and so the movements that they were involved in) are important.  I understand Kandel's insistence on focusing on portraits, not that he doesn't include compositions with more than one figure, and whole figures, when he wants to, and I understand both his and Gombrich's judgement of Kokoschka's portraits; that of Herwarth Walden of 1910, in Maurice Raynal's Skira Modern Painting (1950), was one of the loves (in art) of my adolescence, and it still is.  But throughout his long life Kokoschka strove for expression that Schiele could not avoid.  They were nearly the same age, both too young for Jugendstil to have meant to them what it did to Klimt.  Kokoschka still had 30 years to live when Raynal's big picture books were published.

Now,  Gustav Klimt was seven years older than Henri Matisse (and the latter was not a precocious artist); he was two years older than Richard Strauss and twelve years older than Hofmansthal.  He had passed through three phases and was painting wonderful landscapes, both formal and poetic, when the infamous influenza of 1918 took both him in fine middle age, 46, and, a terrible loss, Egon Schiele at only 28.  It is not very fanciful to suppose that had he been vacationing in the Alps (but it was just at the end of World War I) and escaped the flu, he might have lived, as Richard Strauss did, to the middle of the century (1949).  Of course, Kandel does not discuss music, except for Schönberg and his pupils, because of the patent modernity of serialism.  He might have other reservations anyhow about Richard Strauss and, certainly, Hofmansthal.  Very well, but at least a note in passing is called for when the author is so drawn to Klimt's Salome (Oscar Wilde and not premiered in Vienna) but what about Elektra, 1909 (which is Hofmansthal and as Freudian as anything can be), and what about the ballet, Joseph's Legend of 1914, which needs no libretto to spell out its Freudian meaning.  And I do not mean "Freudian" in only the limited sexual sense, either.  What about the explicitly Viennese character of Rosenkavalier, 1911, with its prime Hofmansthal libretto and its exploration of feminine sexual psychology?  No one is asking Kandel to like the libretto of  Die Frau ohne Schatten.  So far as Vienna 1900 is concerned, in the same year as Strauss's Salome, 1905, Lehar's Merry Widow, with its Meilhac French libretto, and two Viennese Jewish librettists for the German, was a smash hit, and it is every bit as naughtily feminine as any Klimt Kiss littered with ovum and spermatozoa signs.  Female sexuality pervades all of these alike.  As for the now famous drawings showing women masturbating (I blush for Kandel's pretty "pleasuring themselves"!), they are indeed interesting, but I cannot agree that what they are doing is new ca. 1900.  Making a point of representing it so explicitly (not that any female artists did so) is indeed novel.  Hokusai shows labia, clitoris, and the opening of the vagina as an object on display.  Klimt and Schiele show the women as real women, presumably prostitutes.  It helps to invoke Schnitzler, as Kandel does.  He, too, is just Klimt's age, and considering the work that I know, via the Max Ophuls film,  La Ronde, it is easy to imagine the women in that play, first published in 1900, talking about this "pleasuring" (and perhaps enjoying using one of those Viennese dialect words for it) among themselves.  In other words, for a decade of so, and war not yet looming, and with some of one's friends talking to Dr. Freud and an elegant obscenity taken for granted, the feminine subject of female masturbation may have been so fashionable that even the arty and cosmopolitan males may have been in on the conversations.  How could they avoid it?
Now, I doubt whether young Egon Schiele thought that female sex, any more than his own, was merely chic.  He belonged to the next generation, that of, say, Alban Berg.

(I think I'll publish this marked "-1" and continue with the bridge between figural content (Kandel's choice of this subject matter) and neuroscience in a day or two; of course, putting Parmenides as a heading is because of copyright and subject matter that some might not like.  But Popper and Einstein did enjoy an element of whimsy in their amicable arguments about uncertainty.)

"Plato, Locke, and Mill"

The Hellenistic portrait of Epicurus, a snapshot taken at the Getty Museum in Malibu.  No, this Post is not about him, but he'll do.

In the Fall of 1953, when I transferred from Art School to UC Berkeley, l had plenty of credits for Art but lots of General Education courses to catch up on.  Among them, I signed up for Philosphy 6A with Professor Stephen C. Pepper.  This was a man who could really teach.  No attempt to meet us where we were (and that still included veterans of WW II as well as Korea and adolescents just out of high school as well as many students from abroad who lived at International House and, for that matter, all over town) or to entertain us.  Plato, of course, goes down pretty easily, and his representation of Socratic method likewise.  Speaking for myself, then age 19, I was not ready to read Mill.  But I loved Locke from the first page.  Pepper obviously cared deeply for helping us with all three.  Stephen Pepper had just published his textbook on Aesthetics, and two or three semesters later I took Philosophy 136A, Aesthetics, with him, too.  With the passage of time and at an age when one can bring everything together, I find that it was the professors of my parents' and grandparents' generations (generations in my family being short), born between about 1885 and 1920, whose impression has endured.  If you Google that course number at Berkeley today, you will find that it is no longer Plato, Locke, and Mill.
What brought me back to Locke, to those initial stages of learning more than painting and pottery alone?  It was Levenson's book on Newton and the Counterfeiter.  I'm not sure whether I heard of that on the Numismatics Forum (where fakery is always fascinating) or on Science Friday (on NPR) or on Book TV, but I'd become more interested in Newton (whose Principia I cannot manage) partly as a result of reading a bit of the alchemists, unpalatable as they are to me: if Thomas Browne and then Newton and even John Locke took some of them seriously, I ought to find out why.  And my interest in counterfeiting (though before reading Levenson's chapters I hadn't realized how seriously interesting it was) is natural in someone who, from the very beginning of monetization, is deeply interested in its relation to civilization.  More than IT, I think, it changed human societies.  But poor King William!  And, well, it was John Locke who was instrumental in getting Newton made Warden of the Mint, where Newton proved that, however serious his midlife philosophical difficulties had been, there was nothing soft about his mind!  Any Englishman or Scot who may read this may wonder at my ignorance, but as Jeopardy contestants prove daily on TV, there is, barring a dark hole, no pit so abysmal as American ignorance of European history.
Now, since Locke was Newton's true and constant and lifelong friend, and I hadn't read him since the early 1950s, and I have been listening to all the blahblah about our Founders and our Constitution, and I did remember liking Locke even more than Hume, it was high time I found out why our Founders had liked him, too.  After all, Newton was not the easiest of friends.
Now, so far, the interesting thing is that Locke, only a generation younger than Browne, could almost have written our Constitution for us.  In his early work on Toleration, he has Church and State (irrespective of which religion and what kind of state) perfectly worked out, in all its ramifications.  I'll keep reading all of him.  He writes like an angel, too.  I have to ask, whether it was not the classics that I read as an undergraduate, like the professors that I idolized at that time, that literally formed my mind. It certainly wasn't Plato, whose Attic Greek is a joy but whose political ideas were everything that Werner Jaeger thought they were.
I am eager to post something promptly and get back to my reading, so I'll just state the point I want to make.  One of the best ways of directing one's own reading and adapting one's own learning to personal needs and pleasures is simply what I'm in the midst of doing.  It is a bit like stream of consciousness.  Memory, that most delightful subject of inquiry, is always engaged in it.  Some pursuits are fulfilled, others prove to have been illusory.  But you can't go wrong.
For example, I mentioned Pepper's textbook on Aestthetics, as truly mid-20th century as any could be, and I remember it well.  I find very little fault with anything I got from it, and it took me to reading others, such as Gombrich.  So I got to thinking of all the basic assumptions that my professors in art history took seriously, half of them educated in Europe before they had to leave.  I had to recall how many times in my blogs I have resorted to Riegl's ideas, and remember where I got them (since at that time I could not have managed his German).  And then, here was Eric Kandel talking to Charlie Rose.  He was Viennese and has this new book on Vienna 1900.  Even he is a little older than I am, but he imbibed much of the same modernism as I did.  Obviously, I'm going to have to read Riegl (I've read Gombrich and Panofsky over and over).  But if Kandel supposes that Egon Schiele was unknown in the 1950s  to Americans born in the 1930s...   Well, that is for another Post, and I'll keep them in Teegee Essays unless I come to write something about style as such.
It was a mantra at UC Berkeley in my day that the University saw fit to award the PhD when a student was capable of taking over responsibility for his own education.