remarkable from the Index of American Design

Poster © Roy R. Behrens (2022) from Betty Fuerst image

Roy R. Behrens, poster from a series that pays tribute to the Index of American Design (1935-1942). The original watercolor painting is in public domain at the National Gallery of Art.

astonishing from the Index of American Design

Poster © Roy R. Behrens (2022), artist unknown

Roy R. Behrens, poster from a series that pays tribute to the Index of American Design (1935-1942). The original watercolor painting is in public domain at the National Gallery of Art.

a favorite from the Index of American Design

Poster © Roy R. Behrens (2022) with Mina Lowry image

Roy R. Behrens, poster from a series that pays tribute to the Index of American Design (1935-1942). The original watercolor painting is in public domain at the National Gallery of Art.
 

selection from the index of american design

Poster © Roy R. Behrens (2022) with Mina Lowry image

Roy R. Behrens, poster from a series that pays tribute to the Index of American Design (1935-1942). The original watercolor painting is in public domain at the National Gallery of Art.
 

exquisite image / the index of american design

Poster design © Roy R. Behrens (2022)

Roy R. Behrens, poster from a series that pays tribute to the Index of American Design (1935-1942). This particular painting, by Daniel Marshack, documents a woman's gymnasium outfit. The original watercolor painting is in public domain at the National Gallery of Art.

Don Quixote / lunatics, lovers, and poets alike

Don Quixote

Above William Lake Price, Don Quixote in his Study (Photograph, 1857), National Gallery of Art.

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Roy R. Behrens, “Lunatics, Lovers, and Poets: On madness and creativity" in Journal of Creative Behavior Vol 8 No 4 (1975), pp 228ff—

Don Quixote has tunnel vision, by which he sees through the tunnel of love. Everything he sees relates to chivalry. It is as if he wore blinders, like Rocinante his “steed.”

He calls his neighbor a “squire.” He dons armored armour, with a cardboard visor top. He sees prostitutes as ladies. His unbridled imagination has left us with phantoms of windmills, whch are in turn synonymous with Quixote and quixotic. When he hears the “neighing of steeds, the sound of trumpets, and the rattling of drums,” his sidekick  Sancho Panza sees “nothing but the bleating of sheep and lambs.” 

Sancho Panza is conventional, while the knight-errant is errant. The “visionary gentleman” is either poetic or crazy. He confuses similarity with identity, whether by purpose or fault. A is not not-A, but inside Quixote’s mind, A and not-A merge as one. His five-and-dime descendant is the nearsighted cartoon character Mister Magoo, who (in Magoo Goes Shopping) sees and treats a rib cage (A) as if it were a xylophone (not-A), implying that musical pitch is related to the length of the ribs.…

In Magoo cartoons, Sancho Panza is Waldo. He is Watson in Sherlock Holmes. Sancho, Waldo and Watson represent unexceptional views. They know that A is A, that A is not not-A. “Look, sir,” Sancho calls out to the knight-errant, “those which appear yonder are not giants, but windmills; and what seem to be arms are sails…” more>>  

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Below An interpretation of Don Quixote by José Guadalupe Posada, c1908.

Worm Runner's Digest meets the Unabomber

Roy R. Behrens (1972)

Above Cover of the Journal of Biological Psychology (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan) Vol 14 No 1 (July 1972). Designed by Roy R. Behrens.

•••

How strange it is to run across an artwork, design, essay, or whatever, that dates from earlier in life, in this case fifty years ago. I can barely remember the brief time period during which I worked (remotely) with a then well-known (albeit controversial) scientist, a biologist and animal psychologist named James V. McConnell (1925-1990). In 1972, he was on the faculty at the University of Michigan, and had become “famous” for his claims of memory transfer in planeria, also known as “flat worms.” In 1962, he published a research paper in which he reported that when flatworms were conditioned to certain stimuli, and their body parts fed to other flatworms, the subsequent group appeared to learn more quickly. He concluded that this was evidence of a chemical transfer of memory, which he called Memory RNA. Eventually, other scientists failed to arrive at the same results as his experiments, and his findings were dismissed.

I think I became aware of McConnell, not just because of his flatworm research, but because he had founded an amusing double-purpose journal. One half of it was a serious scientific periodical called the Journal of Biological Psychology. The other half (printed topsy turvy to that, but bound with it, each bearing a separate cover) was a science humor journal, titled The Worm Runner’s Digest, in which he published satirical take-offs that looked like research papers, but were not.

Initially, when McConnell began this tandem periodical in 1959, the combined halves together were known as the Worm Runner’s Digest. But in 1966, he adopted two separate titles. On the JBP side of the journal, he published serious scientific articles such as his own research about “Memory transfer through cannibalism in planaria”; while, on the humorous WRD side, he published satirical articles, such as “A Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown.” Predictably, there were readers who objected, some of them claiming that it was sometimes too difficult to sort out the jokes from the science.

In 1972, I was a first-year university professor, just out of graduate school at the Rhode Island School of Design, and had just begun to teach at the University of Northern Iowa. I don’t now recall how I became affiliated with McConnell and his journal. Surely I must have written to him, and I presumably sent him submissions, one of which he published in the JBP. It was a serious essay about anamorphic distortion in art in comparison to the diagrams in On Growth and Form by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, the celebrated Scottish biologist. I also submitted a humorous collaged narrative (structured like pages of a comic book) that is not in the least bit funny now—but he kindly published it nevertheless in the WRD. 

Our collaboration went on from there. In the early 1970s, McConnell published several of my illustrations as covers (my favorites are the two pen-and-ink drawings shown here). I also submitted a series of single-image comic collages (none of which are amusing today). These were heavily influenced by the collage-illustrated short stories of Donald Barthelme (who I had learned about in graduate school), using bits and pieces of antique steel engravings. 

McConnell was in Michigan and I was in Iowa. We never met in person, and I don’t think we even spoke on the phone. But we did exchange letters, and his—if I’m not mistaken—were a lot longer than mine. I still have them somewhere. In the mid-70s, I moved to Wisconsin, and our exchanges slowed, then totally stopped.

There is a bizarre ending to this, which I did not learn about until a few years ago. In 1985, James McConnell was one of the people who were targeted by the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. A package (which appeared to be a manuscript) was mailed to his house, where it was opened by a research assistant. When the bomb exploded, McConnell was in the same room. He escaped life-threatening injury, but he ended up with a substantial hearing loss. He retired three years later, and died in 1990. 

Roy R. Behrens (1972)

Joseph Langland / life, literature, ethnic origins

Newly edited Joseph Langland video

Willi Baumeister cartoon / Hitler in electric chair

Schlemmer (left) and Baumeister

Above Margrit Baumeister, Oskar Schlemmer and Willi Baumeister 1929 in Frankfurt am Main.

Willi Baumeister, in Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, Art under a dictatorship. New York: Octagon Books, 1973, page 87—

My friends in Wuppertal, Oskar Schlemmer among them, sent me humorous letters and postcards from time to time, with paste-up pictures and surrealist texts. I sent them, rather naively, a cartoon, cut from a US newspaper, of an electric chair with Hitler on it. Suddenly I was summoned to Gestapo Headquarters. I was confronted by the Gestapo censor with my entire correspondence for the last year and a half. Thank God, Hitler in the electric chair was not among the intercepted letters. I extricated myself by writing a long report to the Gestapo, explaining that these were plans for a book dealing with color modulation and patina, in connection with an especially resistant paint for the camouflaging of tanks and pill boxes.

today I bought a dress that is made out of wood

Where is the fifth pig?

Ione Robinson, A Wall to Paint On. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1946, p. 373-374, while visiting Berlin, from a letter dated November 8, 1938 (less than a year in advance of the start of World War II) —

Today I bought a dress that is made out of wood. I still can't believe it. In fact, there was not one “natural” item in this department store; everything was synthetic. In an arcade on Unter den Linden, I spent a long time looking at photographs of Hitler and I bought a series of tiny "flap” [flip book] photos which, when you riffle them fast, make him come to life like a miniature movie. The one I have shows him making a speech and if you riffle the pages slowly the gestures are so calculated and ridiculous they make you laugh—although that is one thing I have not seen people do in this city. 

The people in the streets [of Berlin] look worn and tired. Life is completely regulated. There are signs every few feet, telling one what to eat and believe. Money is controlled. Four dollars a day is about all you can spend. In a certain sense, this makes life very simple—you know exactly what you can and cannot do. Even though certain things could be achieved through such a system, I don't see how anyone could be happy. I begin to feel as though I were living in a well-run jail. There is the same security of a bed at night, something to eat, and a few hours of “forced” recreation. But the realization that one must constantly yield to the will of a single man takes all the incentive and moral force from a human being.

always in the throes of a long drinking bout

photograph of Amedeo Modigliani

Anon, H. HODIGLIENI in New York Tribune, February 7, 1920, p. 4—

PARIS, Feb. 6—H. Hodglieni [sic] [Amedeo Modigliani], an artist, who claimed to have invented cubist painting, was found dead in a hovel in the Latin Quarter. He used to frequent Paris cafés dressed in trousers with legs of different colored materials.

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Ilya Ehrenburg, People and Life: memoirs of 1891-1917. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1961, p.143—

…no one now can give an exact description of how [artist Amedeo] Modigliani used to dress: when times were good he wore a coat of light velvet with a red silk scarf round his neck, but when he was in the throes of a long drinking bout, ill and penniless, he was enveloped in brightly colored rags.

gestalt theory, attention, and problem-solving

Thinking Outside the Box (2022)

Armitage as impressario and aristocrat of art

Above I have written about the American graphic designer Merle Armitage because he was, undoubtedly, an accomplished book designer, whose primary income came from his activities as a "booking agent" or "impressario" for prominent performing artists, among them Anna Pavlova, Amelita Galli-Curci, Rosa Ponselle, and the Diaghilev Ballet. He wrote books about these and other artists because, as he once explained to Henry Miller, it provided him with the opportunity to design books, which is what he most enjoyed. My long essay on his life is online here. At the same time, I have also known that some of his personal qualities were less than admirable. I was reminded of that as I recently read this passage in Ione Robinson's autobiography (below).

•••

Ione Robinson, A Wall to Paint On. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1946, page 79—

The heat is stifling, and I have spent most of the day sitting [in Los Angeles] in the Plaza waiting to meet the Mexican Consul. I tried to forget the heat by reading something Merle Armitage gave me as I was leaving: a copy of his address before the California Art Club's Open Forum. It didn't help me bear the heat; in fact, it really frightened me, because Mr. Armitage seems to want to be the Lorenzo de Medici of Los Angeles. Already everyone listens to him, and the younger artists at home are under his thumb, simply because he can afford to buy a canvas when he wants to (although he never spends over a certain amount on any canvas, which is so small that in the end it does not really help a poor painter). But in this speech he is trying to prove that there is an “aristocracy in art”: he carefully quotes Webster on the definition of Aristocrat and Common, and then tries to twist a special meaning out of these words that will justify his right to judge esthetics. I really believe that he would like to feel that he is the arbiter of greatness in the art of our time. He believes that the masses of people have nothing to contribute to art, nor is their judgment to be relied upon, and argues that without people like himself there would never have been artists and writers like El Greco and Voltaire. What he forgets is that El Greco and Voltaire painted and wrote for the people, and not just for men like Merle Armitage. He actually wrote this: “How can the really common people have anything in common with, anything of sympathy for, as aloof and aristocratic a thing as art? If left to the common people, and I use the word ‘common’ as I have previously defined it, there would be no art.” The reason this frightens me is because Mr. Armitage is already the manager of the Los Angeles Grand Opera Association, and now seems on the verge of being the impresario of painters in California. I am glad I'm going to Mexico.

Ione Robinson (source)

 

tobacco road / the story of a boy who smoked

EVOLUTION OF A BOY WHO SMOKED, in The Journal (Huntsville AL), February 28, 1907, p. 2. Reprinted from the Chicago Daily News. Artist unidentified—

Do you know any little boy that [sic] smokes cigarettes? If you do, just show him this picture. It is the sad story of Dick Sillypate. He saw another boy smoking a cigarette, and thought it looked so manly that he would try it himself. The picture shows what happened to him at the end of five months.