he and i sat down together and became friends

Roy R. Behrens, Montage (detail)

Kurt Vonnegut, in William Rodney Allen, ed., Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988), p. 68—

The most pleasant author I might see socially is John Updike. First time I met Updike, incidentally, which was very funny, was on the Boston shuttle down to New York. The plane was not crowded, and as I walked down the aisle, this voice came from a seat saying, "Are you really him?" And so I turned to see who said it and it was John Updike, and we sat down together and became friends.

ART / DESIGN TALKS begin Wednesday, May 7

NEW SERIES of talks on art and design, beginning Wednesday, May 7, 2025, at the HEARST CENTER FOR THE ARTS in Cedar Falls IA. Presenter: Roy R. Behrens.

Mary Snyder Behrens / currently exhibited work

Mary Snyder Behrens / 2025

Tomorrow afternoon marks the opening "artists' reception" for an exhibition (12:00-2:00 pm), titled the 2025 Group Fiber Show, at the Burlington Art Center (301 Jefferson Street) in Burlington, Iowa. 

Shown above is one of the featured works, a dress made entirely of used tea bags, titled The Tea Party Dress, created by Iowa-based artist Mary Snyder Behrens (2025). More examples of her work can be accessed online here.

Despite its recycled components, the elegance of this artwork is undeniable. To see it only in photographs is one experience surely, but its nuanced richnesses become far more evident when viewed in person. You won't regret it.

book design and when work is truly meaningful

Above Merle Armitage cover design for his book, George Gershwin, Man and Legend. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1958.

•••

Bernard Wolfe, Memoirs of a Not Altogether Shy Pornographer (Garden City NY: Doubleday and Company, 1972), p. 157.  

[THERE IS a Law of Laws] that says, it's not the paycheck you get that determines the value of the work you do, it's the inspired and organized energy you put into the project, the invention, inner direction, personal thrust no matter what payroll you're on, the best payrolls are your own, the best jobs are free-lance. That says, the difference between those who do and those who get done to and [who get done] in is what's hungered for, the life on your feet or the life flat on your back. That says, there are the active ones, the makers; then there are the passive ones, the made. That says, work ethic be damned, what we're talking about is the nature and direction of hunger, whether your need is to stiff the world a little or be steamrollered.

Chap-Book Style Poster for Bicycle Club / 1895

Above Will H. Bradley, Bicycle Poster (1895).

•••

Billie Holiday—

They think they can make fuel from horse manure…Now, I don’t know if your car will be able to get 30 miles to the gallon, but it’s sure gonna put a stop to siphoning.

title slide / what have you to share with us today

Speaking of class meetings and education, while they still exist, I am currently preparing a series of three online talks (for OLLI Drake) about various aspects of art and design. One source of pleasure in preparing these is (of course) to share my ideas about the process of designing. Another source is the process of designing the slides that are actually used in the talk. This is the title slide for the third talk in the series.

•••

Vernon Fisher, Navigating the Stars (Chicago and Kansas City: Landfall Press & Karl Oskar Group. 1989). p. 24—

One little girl never brought anything to sharing time. Other children might bring an authentic Indian head-dress acquired on a vacation in Arizona, or a Civil War sword handed down from Great Granddad, but whenever the teacher asked: "Dori, do you have anything to share with us today?" she only stared at the top of her desk, shaking her head firmly from side to side. Then one day, long after her turn had mercifully passed, Dori abruptly left her seat and walked to the front of the class. With everyone's startled attention she began: "Today on the way to school I found something that I want to share." She held her arm stiffly out in front of her and began slowly dropping tiny pieces of shredded Kleenex. "See?" she said. "Snow."

dreams of fields / book of essays coming soon

An advance announcement has just been made by Ice Cube Press (North Liberty IA) of my soon to be published book, titled DREAMS OF FIELDS: Memory Traces of Iowa’s Past.

It’s a collection of twenty-five essays that I’ve published over many years. They are accounts of people and occurences in Iowa’s past, some of which are all but unknown, while others are familiar, but presented in a different light.

I doubt if many people know, for example, that Ralph Waldo Emerson walked across the winter ice on the Mississippi River to speak in Iowa towns, Cedar Falls among them. Or, what took place in 1939 when Frank Lloyd Wright and Grant Wood spoke at the same festival in Iowa City.

Who knows that Iowans from Manchester, including three of my great aunts, lived among the Navajo in New Mexico for three decades, promoted Native American arts, and published books about sandpainting and other traditions in Navajo life? One of the most celebrated American women photographers was Iowa-born, as was the artist who (unnamed) drew the cartoons for Robert Ripley’s syndicated features—Believe It or Not.  

The book is currently out for review. It will be officially launched at a reading on Sunday, August 17, at 2:00-3:00 pm, at the Hearst Center for the Arts in Cedar Falls. Mark that down!

In the meantime, don’t hesitate to share the news with others who yearn for the past of our state and our nation. More information can be found, and pre-orders can be placed online at <https://icecubepress.com/2025/01/27/dreams-of-fields/>.

metamorphosis / shape-shifting and animation

Of late we’ve been exploring the workings of metamorphosis, the transition of a single form from one shape to another. A phenomenon not unrelated to shape-shifting, evolution diagrams, and animation sequences.

Among the best inventors of metamorphic sequences was a Victorian artist named Charles H. Bennett (1828-1867). He was more generally known for comic illustrations, such as those for children’s books. He's worth looking into.

Above and below are examples from a series of metamorphic images that were initially published weekly in The Illustrated Times (c1863) as Studies in Darwinesque Development, which was later republished posthumously in a book titled Character Sketches, Development Drawings and Original Pictures of Wit and Humor (1872).

 

Buffalo Bill look-alike becomes an airborne hero

Wherever I’ve lived, I think I’ve always been interested in what has happened in the past in that state, region or location. South, East, West, Midwest. Wherever. I am often amazed by the things that I’ve found. This month I’ve published a new essay about an Iowa-born performer who partly made his living from pretending to be another Iowa-born showman, the illustrious William F. Cody or Buffalo Bill. 

The wannabe impersonator, who ended up adopting the name of Colonel Samuel Franklin Cody, eventually moved to Europe, where he became the British equivalent of the Wright Brothers—that is, he invented some of the first powered aircraft, and piloted what is considered to be the first airplane flight in England. You can find the entire story in the February 2025 issue of The Iowa Source (Fairfield IA), but it’s also online here.

dinner scraps of great horned owls and others

Wikipedia article: A pellet, in ornithology, is the mass of undigested parts of a bird's food that some bird species occasionally regurgitate. The contents of a bird's pellet depend on its diet, but can include the exoskeletons of insects, indigestible plant matter, bones, fur, feathers, bills, claws, and teeth. 

Photograph copyright © Mary Snyder Behrens 2025.

an ill-fated way to celebrate war's end in 1945

Digital Montage © Roy R. Behrens 2024

Above One of a series of in-process montages having to do with the Ballets Russes (the Russian Ballet). Copyright © Roy R. Behrens, 2024.

•••

ART BUCHWALD, Leaving Home (New York: G.P. Putnam ’s Sons, (I993) , pp. 188-189—

I was in New York City on VJ day [Victory Over Japan Day in 1945]. No one can imagine what it was like to be a Marine on VJ night in New York City. People hugged me, girls kissed me, my hand was sore from being shaken. Then I went and did something stupid. I bought a pint of very bad whiskey called “America the Brave." It was even worse than raisin jack [fermented raisin wine]. I drank the whole bottle in four minutes and proceeded to get sick on the curb at Broadway and 47th Street. I presented an awful picture, a disgrace to my uniform, my country, and to the Great White Way. Why, on this night of all nights, I chose to get drunk instead of enjoying the moment is something I have often asked myself, since I could have been dancing in the streets with a Rockette from Radio City in my arms, or a Smith girl like the ones I used to ogle at the Biltmore. I could have been taken to the Stork Club by a divorcee whose boyfriend was a lieutenant on a destroyer off the Philippines. I could have wound up seated on a couch in Frank Sinatra's dressing room at the Paramount Theater. Instead, I put a dagger in my stomach with a pint of the worst rotgut money could buy .

Einstein steals tobacco from unsuspecting Bohr

Above One of a series of in process montages having to do with the Ballets Russes (the Russian Ballet). Copyright © Roy R. Behrens, 2024.

•••

Abraham Pais, Niels Bohr's Times: In Physics, Philosophy, and Polity (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 13—

[During a brainstorming session with Niels Bohr at Princeton University, in which Bohr paced around his office, he] then asked me if I could note down a few sentences as they emerged during his pacing. It should be explained that, at such sessions, Bohr never had a full sentence ready. He would often dwell on one word, coax it, implore it, to find the continuation. This could go on for several minutes. At that moment the word was "Einstein." There was Bohr, almost running around the table and repeating: “Einstein…Einstein…” It would have been a curious sight for someone not familiar with him. After a little while he walked to the window, gazed out, repeating every now and then : “Einstein…Einstein…”

At that moment the door opened very softly and Einstein tiptoed in [from an adjoining office]. He indicated to me with a finger on his lips to be very quiet, an urchin smile on his face. He was to explain a few minutes later the reason for his behavior. Einstein was not allowed by his doctor to buy any tobacco. However, the doctor had not forbidden him to steal tobacco, and this was precisely what he set out to do now. Always on tiptoe he made a beeline for Bohr's tobacco pot, which stood on the table at which I was sitting. Meanwhile Bohr, unaware, was standing at the window, muttering “Einstein…Einstein…” I was at a loss what to do, especially because I had at that moment not the faintest idea what Einstein was up to.

Then Bohr, with a firm “Einstein," turned around. There they were, face to face, as if Bohr had summoned him forth. It is an understatement to say that for a moment Bohr was speechless…A moment later the spell was broken when Einstein explained his mission and soon we were all bursting with laughter.

El Lizzitsky, Stravinsky and the Russian Ballet

Above One of a series of digital montages (in process) having to do with the Ballets Russes (the Russian Ballet). Copyright © Roy R. Behrens, 2024.

•••

ROBERT CRAFT, An Improbable Life. Vanderbuilt University Press, 2002, p. 184—

Dorothy [Christopher Isherwood's maid] had never heard of [Igor] Stravinsky. She thought she recognized Igor as a Jewish comic on the Molly Goldberg show.

who can you truss? i'd walk a mile for a camel

source

EDWARD MARSH and CHRISTOPHER HASSALL, Ambrosia and Small Beer. NY: Harcourt Brace. 1965—

A soldier up for medical exam proved to have been wearing a truss for the past 6 years, and was classified as P. E. or Permanently Exempt. On his way out he gave this news to his pal, who immediately asked for the loan of the truss, which was granted. The examiner asked how long he had been wearing it, and he said “Six years," whereupon he was classified as M.E. "What's that?” he asked. "Middle East." “How can I go to the Middle East when I've been wearing a truss for 6 years?" “If you can wear a truss for 6 years upside-down, you can jolly well ride a camel for 6 months."

cockroaches in the pentagon / estimated number

Source

LEWIS H. LAPHAM, et al., The Harper’s Index Book (New York : Henry Holt, 1986)—

Percentage of Americans who never read books: 45. Estimated number of cockroaches in the Pentagon : 2,000,000. Percentage of Americans who say they don’t know how they could get along without Scotch tape: 46. Number of plastic pink flamingos sold in the US in 1985: 450,000.

Henry Mayer's WWI Pasteboard Charlemagnes

Here are two views of a single illustration, created by Hy Mayer (aka Henry Mayer) and published in Puck (19 September 1914), vol 76 no 1959, pp. 12-13. It was accompanied by a text about the outbreak of World War I, titled “The Pasteboard Charlemagnes by Benjamin De Casseres. 

Mayer’s illustration, titled “Militarism: From the Craddle to the Grave,” is an upsidedown double image. As shown here, it appears to be the image of a child when viewed upright, but turned upsidedown, it looks like a German helmet with a human skull inside.

Thanx to Soo Hostetler / Tom Tate / Philip Fass

pleased to attend / Elena Diane Curris Exhibition

Last evening, I had the pleasure of attending the opening of the 2024 Elena Diane Curris Biennial Design Exhibition the UNI Gallery of Art. Below is a two-part posting I uploaded to LinkedIn earlier this afternoon. Such a wonderful exhibition, as well as a pleasurable social event.

Elena Diane Curris Graphic Design Exhibit 2024

Curris Exhibition Opening

 

four persons who deserve wider recognition

In the last week of October, I will begin to teach my latest online course for Drake University, as part of their Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) course offerings. Titled ACCOMPLISHED BUT INSUFFICIENTLY PRAISED, over four weeks, with one presentation each week, I'll be sharing what I know about the lives of Four People Who Deserve to be More Widely Known. Looking forward to it.

there is no better book about human creativity

Douglas Fowler, S.J. Perelman. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983, p. 83—

Continuing an ancient and honorable line of speculation into the nature of humor, Arthur Koestler has theorized [in The Act of Creation] that human laughter may be a sort of alternative satisfaction of “biological drives,” a substitute for “killing and copulating,” for planting antipersonnel bombs. The aggression implied in laughter—and laughter almost always involves ridicule, bringing low—is “sublimated, often unconscious,” but the mechanism of laughter surely involves a psychic effort to reduce or even imaginatively destroy its objects; and we can agree that a good part of the comic phenomenon might be understood as brutality without consequence.

•••

I discovered The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler’s classic book on science, art and humor, as a college freshman in 1965. It had been published the year before. At nearly 500 pages, it is not an easy read. Or, it might be better to say that the text, as one moves through it, is immensely pleasurable, stirring and insightful. That is especially true of Part One. In Part Two, as Koestler cautions, the wording thickens somewhat and the content grows more technical. But you must not be put off by this. 

Over the years, I have owned six or seven copies of this book, and yet I have never read the entire text in sequence, page by page from beginning to end. I don’t think it works best for that. But most likely I’ve read every word, in session lengths and sequences that seemed appropriate at the time. Even today, I still go back to it, because its concepts are so illuminating, and the writing is so perfectly phrased. I have learned immeasurably, I don’t deny, from other educational opportunities, and from other published sources, but I continue to be convinced that, at a critical point in my life, Koestler’s book provided a “big picture” framework for those.  

The entire book is now available free online. If the book seems somewhat daunting, you might first read an essay I wrote in 1998. More recently, I produced a short video talk on the subject, which is also free online. Near the end of the video, I recall an incident that took place in my classroom, back in 1968, when I was a 7-12 art teacher in a public school. In subsequent years, as a university professor (and as a grapher design and writer) I made frequent use of Koestler's approach to innovation—and I still use it to this day.

the frustrations of small mistakes in video talks

Making online videos is apparently always a challenge. From my experience, the results are always uneven, largely because there are always mistakes. Some months ago, for example, I made what is presumably the best of my eighteen video talks—or at least the most popular one. The title is Art, Design and Gestalt Theory: The Film Version, and currently (although I do not promote it by pleading for viewers to “like and subscribe”) on the average it is being watched by someone, somewhere in the world, day and night, about once per hour. As good as it is, I still wince in response to its errors.

One that always bothers me is a scene in which I provide an example of the simultaneous contrast of color, in which a single color appears to be two noticeably different colors, when placed in different settings. The still shot reproduced above is the slide that I intended to use. It is a persuasive example of simultaneous contrast, because the field of background gray (behind the name Bing Crosby) conspicuously appears to be two distinctively different grays. This is the image I should have used, and everything would have been perfectly fine. Unfortunately, as I was editing the final version, I slightly adjusted the overall color balance—with the result that the contrast effect is far too subtle in the film.

Temple Grandin and the Ames Demonstrations

Good news travels slowly here. I recently ran across a book by Temple Grandin (widely-known authority on autism and animal science) published in 2018, titled Calling All Minds: How To Think and Create Like An Inventor (New York: Philomel Books). In other words, it has been in print for six years—but only now have I discovered that I am mentioned by name in its pages.

Grandin is world-famous, and I have long been interested in her work. Few people are as widely admired. Since 1984, she has been the recipient of 101 prestigious awards, including honorary doctorates from the leading universities, being chosen for Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People, inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Science, and named as one of the Top Best College Professors in the US.

That’s phenomenal. Given all that she’s achieved, how could she possibly even attend all those award ceremonies, and still remain productive? She is one year younger than I am. I cannot begin to imagine receiving so many awards—I would never have accomplished anything. Maybe I am fortunate that the less-than-prestigous awards I've received can be counted on one hand. And I don’t have extra digits.

My interest in Grandin reached its peak in 2010, with the release of a popular Hollywood film about her life, in which she was portrayed by actress Clare Danes. At the beginning of the film, we learn about a turn of events that occured while she was in high school. She saw an educational film about the then popular laboratory experiments of American artist and optical physiologist Adelbert (Del) Ames, Jr., usually referred to as the Ames Demonstrations. The best-known of these are the Ames Window (in which a rotating window-like cut-out appears not to rotate, but to sway back and forth), and the Ames Distorted Room (in which people’s sizes appear to change as they move around a cleverly misshapen room interior).

Since Grandin and I are nearly the same age, we were probably introduced to the Ames Demonstrations at around the same time. Her response was to try to figure out how to build an Ames Room. She succeeded. As an aspiring art student, with a familarity with perpective and anamorphosis, I too replicated an Ames Room, an Ames Window, and other demonstrations, then spent a substantial amount of my life researching and writing about his development as an artist. And indeed, today I continue to publish new findings.

Over the years, I published multiple articles on the Ames Demonstrations and their significance. In the text and bibliography of her book, Grandin refers to one of my articles, published in 1987, titled “The Life and Unusual Ideas of Adelbert Ames, Jr.” In the text, she even mentions me by name, for which I am grateful, because it is far more common for other authors to make blatant use of another author’s research, but neglect to credit it as a source.

In this case, there is a peripheral downside. While I have been credited, it was disappointing to find that I was also wrongly quoted. In my article, I had quoted a published statement by prominent Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner, who had been married to Ames’s niece. Bruner and his wife’s uncle apparently had their quibbles, and, in his autobiography (1983), Bruner discounted the impact of Ames’s research with the following statement: “It was demonstration that he [Ames] was after, not experimental manipulation. And demonstration of a kind that, I think, speaks more to the artist’s wonder than to the scientist’s. In the end, he had little impact on psychology or philosophy, but he continues to facinate artists.”

In Grandin’s book, she doesn’t mention Bruner. She states instead that it was “Roy R. Behrens, Professor of Art at the University of Northern Iowa” who “concludes that much of Ames’s work has more appeal for the artist than for the scientist. As a visual thinker, I have to disagree.” But I myself did not disparage Ames’s work. I only quoted Bruner, as one view of a prominent scientist, which, in the original article, I then qualified with a lengthy footnote on writings by others who may or may not have agreed with Bruner’s dismissive assessment.

In the end it doesn’t especially matter of course. I continue to be greatly pleased to have been mentioned by someone whose achievements are exemplary, and whose work is so well known.

•••

NOTES
Temple Grandin has also written about her interest in the Ames Demonstrations in Temple Grandin and Margaret M. Scariano, Emergence: Labeled Autistic, New York: Warner Books, 1996.

More recently, I have produced a series of three online video talks (30 minutes each) which provide an overview of Del Ames, his life and his accomplishments. These to some extent are based on my published research articles, but they also include new, surprising information that I have found more recently. These can be accessed free online at <https://youtu.be/MAEjgatMkio>, <https://youtu.be/-8gaYm2FUI0>, and <https://youtu.be/mxOEx2JLQBA>. My articles on Ames include:

Roy R. Behrens, “The Life and Unusual Ideas of Adelbert Ames, Jr,” in Leonardo, vol 20 no 3 (1987), pp. 273-279.
______________, “Adelbert Ames and the Cockeyed Room,” in Print magazine, vol 48 no 2 (1994), pp. 92–97.
______________, “Eyed Awry: The Ingenuity of Del Ames,” in North American Review, vol 282 no 2 (1997), pp. 26-33.
______________, “The Artistic and Scientific Collaboration of Blanche Ames Ames and Adelbert Ames II,” in Leonardo, vol 31 (1998), pp. 47-54.
______________, “Adelbert Ames, Fritz Heider, and the Chair Demonstration,” in Gestalt Theory, vol 21 (1999),” pp. 184–190.
 

I have also provided Ames biographical articles for Encyclopedia of Perception, Grove Online Dictionary of Art, askArt, and Allgemeines Kunstlerlexikon.

the education of vision—before it's too late

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzYrUfsAvkZur5cBv6xlhSg

 

raw canvas / so many areas were left unfinished

Paul Cézanne, The Bathers

Donald M. Anderson, Elements of Design. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961—

Toward the end of his career [Paul] Cézanne often found that raw canvas provided the proper tone for some passages. Max Weber, the distinguished American painter, relates that when Henri Rousseau, the primitive genius, saw such a passage in Cézanne’s The Bathers, he remarked, “Too bad he left so many places unfinished. I wish I had it in my studio, I could finish it nicely.”

Oops / John Sloan & Adelbert Ames, Jr. riposte

still image from online Ames video trilogy

Oops. Soon after posting that quote about the friendship of Adelbert Ames Jr. (born aristocrat) and artist and socialist John Sloan (born democrat), about how opposite they were, I ran across new information. Herbert Faulkner West’s account may have made it sound as if the social status of Ames, in comparison to Sloan, was completely one-sided. But soon after we found that Sloan had moved to Hanover NH in part because his cousin, John Sloan Dickey, was the president of Dartmouth College during the 1950s and 1960s. That may have tipped the scales a tad, although not completely.

John Sloan / simple, modest & absolutely no airs

John Sloan, Cover illustration (1914)

Herbert Faulkner West, John Sloan's Last Summer. Iowa City IA: Prairie Press, 1952—

I was talking one day with Adelbert Ames, Jr., of the Hanover Institute, researcher, painter and experimenter in color, whose background was about as dissimilar to Sloan’s as could be imagined—Ames who went to Andover and Harvard; Sloan who went for a while to Philadelphia public schools and then graduated to newspaper offices in the same city. One the born aristocrat; the other the born democrat. Yet both got on wonderfully together, and Mr. Ames said to me one day about Sloan: “You can see what a really great man is like—simple, modest, and absolutely no airs whatever.”

John Sloan (1891)

 

Writer Ruth Suckow / Cedar Falls Connection

The success of the Ruth Suckow Traveling Exhibition is non-stop. It continues to travel throughout the state, to libraries, history centers, and other public venues. It has now been booked for exhibits through all of 2025. That’s pretty amazing.

It is currently on exhibit at the Cedar Falls Public Library (Cedar Falls IA), where it will remain on view through Sunday, August 4. Above is a view of a detail of the installation from a video on the website of the Waterloo Courier. In addition, just two days from now, there will be a program (free and open to the public) titled Iowa Writer Ruth Suckow: The Cedar Falls Connection, on Monday (July 8) at 6 pm at the library in the upstairs meeting room.

cliff-hanging illusions as used in early films

Above Advertisement for a Hal Roach 1923 film comedy starring Harold Lloyd, called Safety Last. It shows him hanging precariously from a high-rise window ledge, with a distant busy street below. But in fact that’s not the case. As shown in the diagram below (from E.G. Lutz, The Motion Picture Cameraman), it is all an ingenious camera trick, albeit one that looks utterly real. 

Lloyd posed for various scenes like this, such a below, in which he seems to be suspended from the clockface on a building. When movement is added, both that of the actor and those on the street, it is even more convincing.

Comparable tricks were later used by American artist and optical physiologist Adelbert (Del) Ames II in developing the Ames Demonstrations in Perception, which we have discussed at length in a triad of online videos, titled The Man Who Made Distorted Rooms.

an expatriate artist in Paris with Gertrude Stein

just published more>>>

which [two] things belong together // grouping

Art, Design and Gestalt Theory: The Film Version

 

art, design, architecture / online published links

more>>>

 

Del Ames and Blanche Ames Ames / Vision & Art

Just posted: Reprint of an article by Margaret Fitzhugh Browne, originally published in 1922 in The Boston Transcript, about the art and vision research of Adelbert (Del) Ames, Jr., and Blanche Ames Ames.

Del Ames, Frank Lloyd Wright & Guggenheim

Guggenheim Museum under construction

The famous bungled robbery of the First National Bank in Northfield MN took place on September 7, 1876. The outlaw gang was headed by Jesse James and Cole Younger, who, as ardent Southerners, were infused with anger about the recent Civil War. 

They were especially resentful toward Union General Adelbert Ames (Reconstruction Governor of Mississippi), and his father-in-law, General Benjamin F. Butler (both greatly hated in the South). In postwar years, the James and Younger gang had learned that ex-Governor Ames had moved north to Minnesota, where he (and General Butler) had invested in a flour mill on the Cannon River, and were on the board of directors at the Northfield bank.

Nearly one hundred years later, in 1972, the Northfield Historical Society produced a publication about the city’s history, titled Nuggets from Rice County Southern Minnesota History, which featured articles about the bank robbery as well as the role the Ames family in the development of the town. That publication was edited by a Northfield architect and local historian named Robert Roy (Bob) Warn (1924-1977), who had been a student of Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesen, near Spring Green WI, in the late 1940s or early 1950s.

In that publication, Warn briefly mentions that a son of General Ames was Adelbert Ames Jr. (aka Adelbert Ames II) (1880-1955). Initially trained as a lawyer, the younger Ames switched professions from law to art, to psychology and optics. During the 1940s, he became especially known for having devised about twenty illusion-based laboratory set-ups called the Ames Demonstrations in Perception, notably the Ames Distorted Room and the Rotating Trapezoid Window.

laboratory-sized Ames Room

In March 1947, as part of its bicentennial, Princeton University hosted a three-day conference on “Planning Man’s Physical Environment.” Invited as participants were seventy prominent speakers, among them leading architects, philosophers, and social psychologists [see photo below]. Adelbert (Del) Ames Jr. (of whom most were probably unaware) was among those featured, as was the famous (and typically outspoken) Frank Lloyd Wright, who gave a controversial speech. The two men met, during which Wright spoke admiringly of the Ames Demonstrations, which had been on exhibit at Princeton for three months.

Ames (5 from left) and Wright (2 from right), front row

Following the conference, Wright recommended Ames’ demonstrations to others, including George Nelson, the well-known industrial designer. In a letter to artist / educator Hoyt Sherman at Ohio State University, Ames wrote that “I had the most interesting and stimulating time at Princeton. Practically all the attending members went through the demonstrations and got a great kick out of them, and all wanted copies of any literature that we had on the matter.”

Back at Wright’s Wisconsin studio-school (as recalled by Northfield historian Warn), the architect “told us, his apprentices, of his meeting with Ames at Princeton University…and how the SR Guggenheim Museum, then being designed, was to be an institute for the celebration of the eye—an optical museum.”

It was Wright’s idea that the Ames Demonstrations should be a permanent part of the Guggenheim Museum, but that decision could only be made by Baroness Hilla von Rebay, who was the museum’s co-founder and first director. Solomon Guggenheim was 88 years old (he died the following year), and the baroness (as Ames documents attest) was “in full control of his art expenditures.” As one of Ames’ associates (John Pearson) noted in a memo after the Princeton event, “She [the baroness] is one of the strangest persons in the world, a psychopathic case, a mystic, a very troublesome person, a hero worshiper.” Whatever Wright’s ambitions, the best that he could hope for was a meeting between Ames, Rebay, and himself. But that meeting never took place. Later, a separate proposal was made (without Wright’s involvement) to exhibit the Ames Demonstrations at the Museum of Modern Art, by appealing to Rene d’Harnoncourt, the museum’s director, but that too did not come about.

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As a young graphic design teacher (c1970) who believed that art, design, and architecture should be informed by vision, I replicated some of the Ames Demonstrations for use in exhibits and classroom teaching, and began to publish articles on such subjects as Gestalt theory, anamorphosis, stereo vision, and camouflage. Over the years, my interest in Ames has continued intermittently. I visited Northfield, spoke at Dartmouth, and corresponded now and then with his associates and relatives (among his nephews was the writer George Plimpton). I also published articles on his demonstrations, his early collaboration with his sister (artist and suffragist Blanche Ames Ames), and the indebtedness of his work to anamorphic distortion in art, to disruptively-patterned ship camouflage (called “dazzle camouflage”), to aspects of Gestalt theory, and to the early experiments in cinema by Dudley Murphy (who worked as Ames’ laboratory assistant), Fernand Leger, Man Ray, and others.

In 2022, having strayed into producing online documentary talks, I made a three-part series of films (30 minutes each) about Ames’ life and influence, titled Ames and Anamorphosis: THE MAN WHO MADE DISTORTED ROOMS. These are accessible online, and free to share with others.

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Since the 1930s (almost a century has passed), interest in Del Ames and his demonstrations has risen and fallen, time after time, as society’s concerns have changed. At Harvard, Ames had studied with William James. Eventually, he became associated with Transactionalism, a spin-off of Pragmatism (inspired by John Dewey), in which it was asserted that human experience is not direct objective witnessing, but consists of an amalgam of sensory input, past experience, desires and expectations.

Del Ames may be due for revival again, if (to quote Peter Godfrey-Smith in the June 2024 issue of The New York Review of Books) “we have nothing like the simple, direct contact with the world around us that we suppose. Instead…our brains actively synthesize a picture of the world, continually guessing, extrapolating, and projecting.” And while our sensory input may constrain what we experience, “the constraint can be tenuous, and ordinary perception may be akin to a ‘controlled hallucination’…”

As Ames himself once put it: “The things we see are the mind’s best bet as to what is out front.”