Leonardo

Leonardo, Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 321-324, 1983. Pergamon Press Ltd. Printed in Great Britain. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE VISUAL ARTS, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY David R. Topper Readers are invited to draw attention to noteworthy articles on the above subjectfor review by David R. Topper, Department of History, the University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3B 2£9 Canada Theoreticians of art abhor-and yet continually employ-the disjunctive concepts 'content' and 'form'. A plague to criticism, the concepts nevertheless play a key role in the analysis of works of art. Only those who take the organic analogy too seriously bother about 'murdering to dissect'. In art, as in everything else, dissection precedes analysis, and art theory without analysis is no theory at all. Accordingly, content and form-as concepts that lead to the separation ofelements in an art work-remain in use, because they are exceedingly useful. In the reviews considered below, these concepts are crucial. The first two focus upon a pair of pivotal late-19th century artists (Seurat and Degas), whose compositions contributed to the rise of abstract art in the present century. Nevertheless, the theses of the articles have little to do with the formal elements of art; instead House and Lipton apply to the art of Seurat and Degas, respectively, a content analysis. In particular, they reveal a social meaning in the subject matter, and (not surprisingly) approach it from a Marxist point of view. The next review encompasses a set of articles on 'Realism', introduced by Nochlin's article on 'Order'. Certainly realism historically has not been immune to the dichotomy; the word alone may connote either the form or content of an art work. This fact is made evident in the ten articles on 19th and 20th century realism in this special issue of Art in America. An historical parallel to 20th-century realism is then provided by the issue of the Art Journal devoted to 'Futurism'. Of the issue's ten articles, only two are relevant (Henderson's and Aiken's) to this review. The work of Henderson, in particular, deserves to be introduced to readers of Leonardo; she is doing outstanding research on the art/science interface. And Aiken's study of the cinema dovetails with the last review. Without a doubt, subject matter plays a prominent role in the history of photography. The issue of the Art Journal on this growing field of study contains six essays; it is introduced by Sekula's insightful article. As his review makes clear, photography is not exempt from the theoretical concepts (and accompanying problems) applied to the other fine arts. J. House, Meaning in Seurat's Figure Paintings, Art History 3, 345 (1980). It is common practice for historians and critics to speak more about the form than the content of Seurat's pictures. This bias is not without some foundation; Seurat surely put considerable effort into the way he painted, often basing the manner of applying the paint upon contemporary theories of optics and color perception. But what about the content; is there any message to be gleaned from the people bathing and basking in the sun in Une Baignade or the Grande Jatte? As House points out, there is an obvious contrast between the two pictures: The former depicts working-class men and boys, whereas the latter shows the fashionable middle class. House writes: "I want to argue that the form of the Grande Jatte is an essential part of its meaning, that its theme is the artificiality ofthis facet of Parisian life. This hypothesis has implications for the relationship between the Baignade and and Grande Jatte. The processional 321 ritual of Sundays on the Ile de Ia Grande Jatte ... "was presented in a frieze-like manner, but this composition " ... was quite unsuitable when treating the relaxing workers in the Baignade. The contrast between artificiality and relaxation thus applied to both the form and the subject of the two paintings. They mirror two opposing sides of modern society, on opposite sides of the river. Both are about leisure and recreation, and these are natural for one class but artificial for the other" (p. 348). But how far should this line of...