Tao Te Ching / Bauhaus / Gestalt / Invisible Core

In the past three or four years, I have produced about 18 online video talks, which are indebted to—but not the same—as years and years of classroom slide-embellished talks for courses in graphic design and design history. It is one way to continue to teach, long after having retired from in-person lecturing. The videos have become surprisingly popular, and I suspect that some are being used by university faculty as supplementary teaching resources. The most frequently visited has had thousands of viewers (6000 alone on YouTube, plus those at other sources) which is encouraging, given that I don't admonish viewers to "like and subscribe."The most popular video is a foundations-level overview of the most basic understandings about "how form functions" in design-based art, architecture and graphic design. The title is Art, Design and Gestalt Theory: The Film Version. In referring to it as "the film version," I intended to distinguish it from an academic paper with the same title, that I published twenty-seven years ago (in 1998) in the journal Leonardo (MIT Press).

That print on paper version was (perhaps still is) one of the top-ten most downloaded articles in that magazine's history. The paper and the video address the same subject, but they differ markedly, and I think the film is better. The film is derived from a classroom talk that I nearly always gave on the first day of class in my university-level design studio and foundations courses. It evolved over the years of course. But it seemed to function reliably as a "big picture" overview of what designers, architects and design-based artists might hope to achieve.

At the end of the film, I conclude by saying how lucky I was to have taught during the last 29 years of my teaching career (not 39, as the film narration mistakenly claims) in the Kamerick Art Building at the University of Northern Iowa. As I noticed when I first spoke there, the design of that building is based on recurrent references to a rectangular motif, the shape and proportion (1 by 2) of a domino game piece. That same motif is also fundamental in traditional Japanese architecture, where it occurs in the floor mats or tatami, which measure 3 x 6 feet. I surmised that the Kamerick building pays homage to that, in features both inside and out, an assumption that was verified years later when I spoke to the architect.

Earlier in the film, I allude to the resemblance between Gestalt theory in perceptual psychology, and the Tao Te Ching, which may have been first introduced to me by Weimar Bauhaus Master Potter Marguerite Wildenhain, with whom my friend and teacher Dean Schwarz and I spent a summer studying pottery at Pond Farm (her mountain-top studio, home and school) in Northern California. In her autobiography, titled The Invisible Core: A Potter's Life and Thoughts, she makes explicit references to Lao-tze's famous passage that claims that the essence of a pot is not in the walls, but in the space (or void) within—its "invisible core."

Here is the full passage from Lao-tze:

Thirty spokes meet in the hub, but the empty space between them is the essence of the wheel. Pots are formed from clay, but the empty space within it is the essence of the pot. Walls with windows and doors form the house, but the empty space within it is the essence of the home.

Marguerite Wildenhain was one of many who were struck by that now-famous passage. Another was Frank Lloyd Wright, who was quoted as follows in Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, ed., Frank Lloyd Wright: His Living Voice (Fresno: California State University Press, 1987), pp. 25-26—

One day in 1912 I got a little book from the Japanese ambassador to America ... It was a charming little book and all you ought to own it. It is called The Book of Tea [by Okakura Kakuzo]. Well, there I read Lao-tze for the first time, and I read that the reality of a building does not consist in the roof and the walls but In the space within to be lived in. Well, there is my thesis.

RELATED LINKS 

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work? /  Nature, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage /  Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage /  Optical science meets visual art /  Disruption versus dazzle / Chicanery and conspicuousness /  Under the big top at Sims' circus

is he related to German architect Peter Behrens

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.

an expatriate artist in Paris with Gertrude Stein

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art, design, architecture / online published links

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the anatomy of a conference / design education

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Earlier this week, I posted online this six-page pdf of a printed booklet that served as the schedule of events at a gathering that I was partly responsible for in 2005. It was a conference about design in relation to teaching—not only graphic design, but a more inclusive category, including, for example, industrial and architectural design. The conference title was THE BAUHAUS AND BEYOND 1919-2005: The Shape of Design Education.

Although this conference took place almost twenty years ago, it may be of value to current design faculty at art schools, colleges, universities, art centers, and museums. Conferences (whether online or in-person) can be inspiring events for both faculty and students. But they may as first appear to require too much effort on the part of those who organize them, or perhaps they aren’t affordable.

This booklet documents a conference that was one of three that were organized and hosted by members of the graphic design faculty and students at the University of Northern Iowa. In all three cases, the conferences were carried out with all but zero funding. A "call for proposals" poster was prepared, and sent out, months in advance, postage free, by distributing an email to prospective participants, with a pdf attached. Those who participated in the conference (whether presenters or attendees) were required to provide their own transportation, lodging and meals.

No honoraria or travel allowances were given for presenters, albeit with two exceptions, consisting of prominent speakers who had traveled in and were speaking elsewhere in the region, so that some costs could be shared between schools. The conference were purposely held on days of the week (Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday morning) when the departmental building spaces would most likely be available. Parking might also have been a problem (as is nearly always true for anything other than sports events), but that problem was avoided because campus parking was free and unrestricted on weekends.

Particular attention was given to making the conference schedule align with already-scheduled campus events, such as the annual student art exhibition, and an annual graphic design student portfolio review. Components were scheduled in such a way that participants might easily choose to be present for only the one full-day sequence of events, which took place on Saturday.

We used this method of sponsoring conferences on three occasions, over the span of three or four years. The approach worked reasonably well each time. Comparable information about the two other conferences will be posted here in the near future. Again, the full multi-page pdf can be downloaded here.

PBS gift / Frank Lloyd Wright and Mason City

I couldn't be more delighted to see that my recent book, titled Frank Lloyd Wright and Mason City: Architectural Heart of the Prairie, is currently being offered as a free donation bonus in the fundraising campaign on Iowa PBS. It is featured in two donation options online here and here. 

I think it's a pretty good overview of the influence of European and Japanese traditions on Wright's architectural style (and vice versa), as well as an explanation of why Mason City's architecture is of genuine significance. There is a shortage of serious writing about the importance of things that surround us.

a meeting of midwestern minds? one gets nasty

The lives of Wisconsin-born architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) and Iowa-born artist Grant Wood (1891-1942) overlapped for a half-century. For a dozen or so of their mutual years, they were both celebrities within their respective professions. Surely, they were well aware of each other's work—but did the two men ever meet?

Wood was greatly interested in architecture, as is apparent in the subject matter of his paintings. But what did he think of Wright's architecture? And, in turn, what was Wright's opinion of the Regionalist paintings of Grant Wood and others? Based on evidence from the time, this essay surmises the answer.

John C. Lofton / his astonishing miniature rooms

John C. Lofton, Abandoned Nest in an Empty Room (1976). Wood and other materials. Interior 28h x 16w x 22d. Exterior (on sturdy mounted tripod stand) 90h. Lighted inside through window with shade. 

I’m not sure when I purchased this. It must have been in the 1980s. I was teaching in Milwaukee, and became interested in a series of constructions that consisted of mysterious room interiors. They were miniaturized of course, but enclosed in a box and mounted on a wooden pole-like stand (including the stand, the height of this one is 90 inches). 

Lofton was a local artist who was especially skilled at woodworking. I was drawn to this particular work, because it reminded me of the bleakness of an empty room in (let's say) an apartment at the moment one is moving in—or moving out.

There is a detailed hardwood floor, exactly proportioned moulding, and replicas of a wooden chair, a telephone, an ashtray, and a window on the facing wall. The detail which completes its persuasiveness is the simulated outdoor light that appears to flow in from beyond the window shade.

I can’t recall how much I paid for this. Not a terrible lot, I’m sure. But the amount was sufficient that the artist joked I’d “lost my shirt” in acquiring it. As a result, he graciously threw in a second miniature work of his (see below), a hand-carved balsa wood shirt, with appropriate metal buttons and a wire clothes hanger.

I remember another Lofton work, a second room interior, which I saw but, regrettably, did not buy. Fortunately, I still have a full-color photograph of it (also below). He titled it Bird Cage (1976), a name that surely does not “spoil” or give away its range of interpretative possibilities. 

Is that a toucan on the pole?

These two artworks (the empty room and wooden shirt) have traveled with us everywhere in the years since 1985, as we repeatedly moved from state to state. They have survived unscathed, as have so many other wonderful works which remain in our collection. As we age, of course, we wonder what will become of them. It's not unlike finding a home for a cat. So many questions, so many concerns. 

Vladimir Tatlin's Tower of the Third International

Above Photograph of Russian Constructivist artist Vladimir Tatlin (second from left) and three of his associates in the process of constructing a model of his now famous Tower of the Third International (aka Tatlin's Tower).

•••

George Grosz, An Autobiography. Translated by Nora Hodges. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, pp. 178-180—

Constructivism had many followers in Russia. [Among the most prominent] was a certain [Vladimir] Tatlin, a peculiar Russian child of nature. Tatlin came from a wealthy family and had traveled in Germany before the First World War. At that time he had been a member of a famous balalaika band [in which he played the bandura] and choir [which sang in Ukrainian], which had played before Kaiser Wilhelm at court. He then became a painter and also studied at a school of technology. He got known when he exhibited his big project for a monument in Moscow [intended for construction near the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul] …he himself would never have called it a monument, that word was too old-fashioned and romantic, he called it the “Tower of the Third International” [at full scale, it would have been one third taller than the Eiffel Tower]. The [initial] model of this whole powerful construction was about ten feet high, consisting of all sorts of rods and bars put together at odd angles.…

…[Sometime later] I went to see Tatlin once more. He lived in a small, old, dilapidated apartment. Some of the chickens that he kept slept in his bed. They laid eggs in one corner. We drank tea, and Tatlin chatted about Berlin, Wertheim's department store, and his performance at court. There was a completely rusted wire mattress leaning on the wall behind him with a few sleeping chickens sitting on it, their heads tucked under their wings. They furnished the perfect frame to dear Tatlin as he started to play his homemade balalaika. Darkness appeared through the curtainless window; most panes had been replaced with little squares of wood. We suddenly seemed surrounded by the melancholy humor of a book by [Russian writer Nikolai] Gogol. Tatlin was no longer the ultramodern constructivist; he was a piece of genuine, old Russia. I never saw him again, nor did I ever hear of him or the formerly much discussed “Tatlinism.” He is said to have died alone, and forgotten [in 1953].•

 • According to a Wikipedia biographical text, “In 1948 he was heavily criticized for his allegedly anti-communist stance and lost his job, but was not repressed.”

•••

George Grosz, An Autobiography. Translated by Nora Hodges. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998—

I remember [American literary critic] Edmund Wilson best coming down the steps in his beach coat; like all fat people, he looked most impressive viewed from below…Wilson is more a lobster person than a fish person: you have to use a nut cracker to get to the meat. (p. 305)

Below Vladimir Tatlin, Counter-relief (1916). Photo: Shakko, Wikimedia Commons.

the offense of telling the same thing twice

Alan Fletcher

Above Alan Fletcher [British designer], model of one of twelve proposals for outdoor drinking fountains (made in stone, one meter high), in which each fountain is shaped to form the silhouette of a famous cultural figure, through reversible figure-ground. This one is the silhouette of Albert Einstein. As reproduced in Fletcher, Picturing and Poeting. London: Phaidon, 2006, p. 103.

•••

Vyvyan Beresford Holland [the second son of Oscar Wilde], An Evergreen Garland. London: Cassell 1968, Page 156-157—

My next case [of how to deal with boring people] is that of the horrible habit of repetition, often known as "twicing." This is the offense of telling the same person the same thing twice. Unfortunately, everyone over the age of forty is to some extent a "twicer," because he refuses to remember to whom he has told his stock stories, and he is apt to forget any new stories he has heard. He is also apt to be much too interested in his past life to care very much whether his victim has heard his stories, so long as he can get someone to listen to them once more, particularly if they happen to be true, or were true before they were embroidered out of all recognition. And it is almost worse if he says, "Do stop me if I’ve told you this before," because one should never run the slightest risk of repeating oneself to other people. On the whole, it is far better not to tell stories at all unless either you invited them yourself or they are very short.

The remedy for "twicing" is contained in: 

Rule VI.—As soon as one is certain that a case of "twicing" is about to occur, one should interrupt the "twicer" roughly by telling him that his story reminds you of another one, and then proceed to tell him his own story, with added detail. That is, if he will let you.

Frank Lloyd Wright and the Dessau Bauhaus

Frank Lloyd Wright and Mason City

One often hears people asking about the flow of influence between the German Bauhaus and American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Pertaining to that, it was interesting this morning to run across this passage from the memoir of an eyewitness who was present then—

•••

Matthew Josephson, Life Among the Surrealists. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962—

In Germany [in 1927]…I had been deeply impressed by my visit to the school of the Bauhaus-Dessau where Walter Gropius, [Laszlo] Moholy-Nagy, and their confreres carried on a movement for the teaching and propagation of modern industrial design. These people had been frank to tell me that much of their inspiration was derived from an American artist whom Americans scarcely knew: Frank Lloyd Wright.

Wright and Design

 

age-old Japanese motif in Kamerick Art Building

I became interested in the design of the Kamerick Art Building (on the campus of the University of Northern Iowa) on the first day I saw it in 1990. As a job applicant, I had been invited to speak in the auditorium that day, and, while giving that talk, I recognized the logo-like pattern with which it complies. In my most recent online video talk, I conclude by telling about my realization that day, and how it would later contribute to the experience of teaching design in that building for the next three decades (from 1990-2018). I say 38 years in the film, but it was only 28 years (further confirmation that I have never been good at math).

I was never certain who designed the building (the firm was credited but not the designer). But later, around 2015, while giving a Humanities Iowa talk in a library in Des Moines, I shared that story with the audience. After the talk, a man came up from the audience and introduced himself as the building’s architect. I was delighted when he told me that all my suspicions were accurate. 

Art, Design and Gestalt Theory: Video Version

Recently completed: Our most popular video talk, titled Art, Design and Gestalt Theory: The Film Version (40 mins). It traces the emergence of Gestalt psychology (c1910), as well as its connections to holism, Taoism, yin and yang, displacements of attention, contrast illusions, color, camouflage, graphic design, and architecture. Ideal for classroom screenings, and library discussion events. Non-monetized, free full online access for anyone at YouTube.

online course on the history of design / 2022

Course Introduction Video

Above This is a brief film overview of a four-week course I will be teaching (online), beginning in the first week in October, titled A History of Design: Graphic, Industrial, and Architectural Design in Europe and the US Since 1850. This is Part Two of a series of four. It is one of the fall semester offerings through OLLI at Drake (Oster Lifelong Learning Institute at Drake University). Registration will open during August at <https://alumni.drake.edu/olli>.

Samuel Chamberlain's elaborate failed volvelle

Above Drawing by American artist Samuel Chamberlain. Born in 1895 in Cresco IA, he can’t have stayed there for long. He is buried in Marblehead MA, where he died in 1975. He grew up in Washington State, studied architecture at MIT, and served in both World Wars. He went on the become a widely-admired architectural illustrator and printmaker. His exquisite pencil renderings were often published in art-related periodicals, including the architectural journal Pencil Points. In the passage below, he seems to be describing his proposal (never published) for a wheel-like “information chart” (commonly called a volvelle), not unlike those included in Jessica Helfand’s book, Reinventing the Wheel (NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003) [see cover below].

•••

Samuel Chamberlain, Etched in Sunlight: Fifty years in the graphiuc arts. Boston: Boston Public Library, 1968, pp. 94 and 98—

Along with so much printmaking, I spent most of my spare time [c1938] on a totally different project—a wine chart. My interest in the red and white wines of France has always been intense and relentless, and I was determined to combine the graphic arts with gastronomy in one package that would appeal to all gastronomes and oenophiles. A richly decorative chart, brightened with maps, vignettes and pen-and ink sketches, was the result. Everything was hand-lettered. Openings of various sizes were cut in the chart, and these revealed information on various wines, lettered on a disk. Turn the disk to the right place and all the pertinent data on red Bordeaux, red Burgundy, or Cotes-du-Rhone wines would be progressively revealed. There was a descriptive essay on each wine, mention of good culinary companions, proper serving temperature, good recent years, and the significant names of each type of wine. On the other side of the disk was assembled the same information on the great French white wines, those of Burgundy, Bordeaux, Champagne, Vouvray and Anjou, and Alsace. On the two faces of the chart were drawings of typical bottles and wine glasses, and suggestions of what harmonious wine to serve with food, from oysters, soups, fish, shellfish, chicken, red meats, game and cheese, down to desserts and pastry. There were pointers on the technique of serving wine and on secondary vintages, and a list of gastronomic enemies of wine, from anchovies to Tabasco sauce.

I am absolutely appalled at the magnitude of this undertaking, and feel now that my days would have been spent far more usefully…Once the chart was finished, I showed it to several publishers, all of whom turned it down because it presented too many production problems. It has been in my portfolio all these years, a reminder of a magnificent and earnest way to waste one's time.

Iowa Source / beware gertrude drives herself

Above By fortunate timing, this essay on Gertrude Stein’s Iowa friendships (Carl Van Vechten from Cedar Rapids, and William Edwards Cook from Independence) was published in The Iowa Source at the beginning of this month, coinciding with the release—online here—of our new 60-minute video on the same subject, COOK: The Man Who Taught Gertrude Stein to Drive. We are grateful for the unusually strong interest in both.

new documentary about Gertrude Stein 2022

I am pleased (albeit exhausted) to say that, as of yesterday, I completed what may be my most ambitious undertaking in recent years. It is a sixty-minute documentary voice-over film biography of the life of William Edwards Cook (1881-1959), an American expatriate artist, who grew up in Iowa, but spent his adult life in Europe, living in Paris, Rome, and Mallorca.

Titled COOK: The Man Who Taught Gertrude Stein to Drive, the film is freely available to everyone here online. More specifically, it is a detailed account of the life-long friendship of Cook with the American writer Gertrude Stein. It is based on her frequent adulation of him in her writings, as well as on the contents of 250 pages of their unpublished correspondence.

Cook was never a well-known artist, but he did acquire some renown for two other reasons: In 1907, he was the first American artist to be allowed to paint a portrait of Pope Pius X. Later, in 1926, he used his inheritance to commission the then-unknown Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier to design an early Modernist home (the "first true cubist house") in Boulogne-sur-Seine, which is still intact, and widely known as Maison Cook or Villa Cook.

The friendship of Gertrude Stein and William Edwards Cook (including the roles of their partners, Alice B. Toklas and Jeanne Moallic Cook) was first documented in (my earlier book)  COOK BOOK: Gertrude Stein, William Cook and Le Corbusier (Bobolink Books, 2005). This new documentary film corrects, updates, and adds to the information in that book.

This film project (as well as the earlier book) was made possible by the earlier work of such Stein scholars as Ulla Dydo, Bruce Kellner, and Rosalind Moad, as well as the Stein / Cook correspondence in the collection of the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

In 2005, when COOK BOOK was released, Ulla Dydo (the pre-eminent expert on Stein, and author of The Language that Rises) praised it in the following way: "This book jumps out at my eyes, my ears. It comes from everywhere, never drags those even blocks of print that dull the mind. Look at it, read it, let it tease you: It's researched with all the care that keeps its sense of humor and its visual and voice delights. Travel with it, leave home, go and explore the many ways for a book to be a house for living."

The distinguished critic Guy Davenport wrote: "This is as good as topnotch Behrens gets!"

This film is not without humor, and at times it shares surprises. It may prove of particular value to viewers (both scholars and the rest of us) who are particularly interested in American literature, Modernism, Gertrude Stein, art, architecture, horse racing, Harvard, William James, art collectors, expatriates, Paris, Mallorca, the American Midwest, Iowa, art history, the training of artists, Cézanne, Cubism, Picasso, Le Corbusier, LGBT, and gender identity issues. 

Maison Cook

dust to dust as we totter toward the end of time

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 Above Roy R. Behrens, Architectonic (© 2021). Digital montage.

•••

Wiliam Hazlitt, “On the Fear of Death” in Table Talk (1822)—

Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern—why then should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?

•••

Roy R. Behrens, “Khaki to Khaki (Dust to Dust): The Ubiquity of Camouflage in Human Experience” in Ann Elias, et al., eds., Camouflage cultures: beyond the art of disappearance (Sydney AU: Sydney University Press, 2015)—

…“I am I” and, to follow, I am not “not-I.” Or, I am “self” as distinguished from “others.” We typically regard our “selves” as permeable identities in a bouillabaisse of ubiquitous “stuff,” a surrounding that seems to a newborn, in the famous words of William James, like “a blooming, buzzing confusion.”  One wonders if this might also explain, as Ernst Schachtel suggested, why we are all afflicted by “childhood amnesia,” leaving us with little or no memory of the first years of our lives, because we lacked the “handles” then—the linguistic categories—that enable us to “grasp” events. In recent years, increased attention has been paid to the various forms of “amnesia” at the opposite end of life, including gradual memory loss, senility, dementia, and the horrifying ordeal of Alzheimer’s. If the boundaries of our figural “self” are blurred when we are newborns, perhaps we should not be surprised that the limits of our “self” grow thin—once again—as we totter toward the end of time.

As adults, we use hackneyed phrases like “dust to dust” to imply that at birth we somehow spring from naught; that we metamorphically evolve through infancy and childhood; live out our ritualistic lives as corporeal upright adults; then slowly—or, just as often, catastrophically—“deconstruct”; and (at last) are literally “disembodied” in the process that we dread as death. Instead of saying “dust to dust,” it may be more in tune to say “khaki to khaki,” since it seems as if our lives consist of time-based re-enactments of a spectrum of nuanced relations between figure and ground, some or all of which pertain to varieties of camouflage. 

online access

Ways to remain engaged during a pandemic

The feature article below was published earlier today in the Waterloo and Cedar Falls Courier (Waterloo IA). The full text and photos can be accessed online here.