Moholy-Nagy: Photographs and Photograms, essay by Andreas Haus, translated by Frederic Samson (Munich: Schirmer-Mosel, GmbH., 1978; New York: Pantheon Books, 1980).
The very artiness of this great Hungarian modernist’s photographs can put me off, even though it all takes place on a very high level, and even though the photographs seem to be reproduced with an almost reverent fineness, which must not have been easy to achieve. (Moholy himself had an extraordinary devotion to the most delicate and minute physical properties of the photographic object.) The essay by Haus, who teaches art history at Marburg, is most creative. As one might expect, Moholy’s Constructivist rotated compositional orthogonals relate his work to the photography of Rodchenko, if with interesting ideological differences. But Haus comes up with more uncommon material as well, like his comparison of Moholy’s work with the work of the German Expressionist painter Ludwig Meidner. Haus’ treatment of Moholy’s photography, including his use of the negative, in relation to non-photographic printmaking is astute; I only wonder if the early cliché-verre shouldn’t fit right in there, too.
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Joseph Rykwert, The First Moderns: The Architects of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., and London: The MIT Press, 1980).
Architectural and design theory has long been of concern to me, partly for its relevance to issues in modern art. On this score, Rykwert’s book deserves notice. The trouble is, it would be very difficult to read right through, while using it is like trying to catch up with a 600-mile wilderness expedition already under way. Often, individual sentences are obstacle courses in themselves, each jammed with as many facts and ideas as Rykwert can recall at one time. Rykwert rambles on, entranced, so that the book can seem like a hardly edited, tape-recorded monologue (or perhaps, interesting lectures), reel after reel. The chapter that I turned to was “Truth Stripped Naked by Philosophy,” which, by the way, has nothing to do with the concept (used by Bernini) of truth revealed by time. It starts out being about the Encyclopédie and has something about that again at the end, but in between is chaos; meanwhile, discussions of actual architecture race along, impatient of visual description, leaving the reader wandering. Rykwert obviously knows a lot, but a $50.00 book deserved better editing than this, and better plates, too: some are just grimy snapshots. More dangerously, Rykwert’s relentless barrage of semi-organized data may create the impression that his book, soaked heavy with thought, must be definitive, whereas it is oblivious to at least some recent scholarship (notably Dorothea Nyberg on Meissonnier). Some things are just plain sloppy, as when Rykwert uses the word “mason” in an ambiguous way, arid you may have to turn to the index to see whether he means Freemasonry or masonry in the sense of working with stone. There is much of importance here, but be prepared to mine and smelt it yourself.
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Philip Steadman, The Evolution of Designs: Biological Analogy in Architecture and the Applied Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 276 pages, 28 illustrations.
This lucid, even crisp theoretical history would have gained by including important references such as the essay by the sociologist Georg Simmel on “The Handle.” But no book can say everything, and Steadman says an awful lot on some fascinating subjects, including the topic of the chapter that particularly concerned me, “The Evolution of Decoration.” I take his appreciation of the insightful contributions to design theory of David Pye as another good sign. As this is basically a history of ideas, it doesn’t need fancy plates, and the 28 text figures do nicely. It is too bad, though, that for so much money you get one of those cardboard bindings molded to look like cloth, which the English call “cheapies”. To have used this kind of binding is grossly inept of the publisher, since the book contains the best exposition I know of the concept of skeuomorph—a form made to look the same in some new material as it did when it was executed previously in a different material.
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Kandinsky in Munich: The Formative Jugendstil Years, by Peg Weiss, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979.
In this book Weiss goes over Kandinsky’s arts-and-crafts experience, and also examines his relation to Symbolism, particularly in the circle of the poet Stefan George. Weiss also offers a levelheaded discussion of Kandinsky’s “mystical” poppycock, a concept which has been wheeled out so often—usually to deflect attention from abstract form to iconography—that it squeaks. I particularly like the way she goes ahead and draws comparisons which may not be final but which, rendered with just the right touch, are insightful and downright illuminating. (Students sometimes get marked down even when they do that intelligently, but only by philistines.) Here is a book that lives up to the ideal of docere/delectare, to teach and to delight.
