Roots of Art PDF
Preview Roots of Art
ROOTS OF ART BOOK A STUDIO ROOTS ANDREAS OF ART The Sketchbook of a Photographer FEININGER DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY OCT 1975 cm- a county of denvca THE VIKING PRESS NEW YORK 060*542 dedicate this book to I Loren Eiseley who, by his thoughts and writings, has given me more than any other person, dead or alive. tf& Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Collector's Cabinet, 1000 Madison Avenue, New York, for making the specimens on pages 81-87, 150 and 151 avail- able for photographing. Copyright 1975 in all countries of the International Copyright Union by Andreas Feininger All rights reserved First published in 1975 by The Viking Press, Inc. 625 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022 Published simultaneously in Canada by The Macmillan Company of Canada Limited SBN 670-60807-6 Library of Congress catalog card number: 74-6998 Printed in Japan 779.3 327 F ro Contents ntroduction 7 Sculpture 10 Design 48 II Color 80 IV Structure 96 V Texture 138 VI Ornamentation 160 Epilogue 176 ntroduction art = human ability to make things . . . making or It is in this spirit that I present the following col- doing of things that have form and beauty any lection of photographs. . . . craft or its principles . . . There are many ways of looking at objects of nature. — Webster's New World Dictionary, From the viewpoint of the merchant whose only College Edition, 1966 interest is in monetary values—can he sell it, and for how much? Or from the point of view of the econ- It is in this wider sense that I use the word "art" in omist, whose main concern is whether the objects the title of this book. Because it seems to me that, of his investigation are beneficial or harmful to man. in the last analysis, everything made by human The scientist looks at objects of nature in a totally hands and most things conceived by the human different way from that of the artist, the collector in mind have their prototype in nature. The original a way different from that of the camera fan, whose of the ball-and-socket joint is the hip; a complex hobby is nature photography. And so on. sound navigation system like sonar was "invented" look at objects of nature primarily with the eye I aeons ago by bats. of the structural engineer who is fascinated by the But not only can we do no better than learn from interrelationship of function and form, and with the nature by studying its manifestations, actually this eye of the artist in pursuit of what, for lack of a more is the only way in which we can progress.' This is precise definition, is commonly called beauty. easily proved: The fertile minds of science-fiction These interests of mine go back to the days when, writers have created any number of strange worlds as a boy in my early teens, roamed the hills in I populated by the most fantastic monsters. But every Thuringia, Germany, in search of fossils and insects. single one of these monsters is nothing but a com- These interests were reinforced when, studying to posite of parts of objects of nature found right here become an architect, investigated the connection I on earth, be it human, animal, or vegetable. This is between function and form from a more utilitarian equally true of gods, angels, devils, mermaids, point of view. And they became a full-time avocation dragons, unicorns, or purple polyps. Not one of these when finally retired after twenty years of work as a I creations of the imagination has features which its staff photographer for Life. originator had not known or seen or heard of before; Like all Life photographers, had traveled ex- I not one of the colors in which some unearthly land- tensively in the course of my work. As a result had I scapes glow is unknown on Earth—because the encountered many opportunities to pursue my in- human mind is inherently incapable of imagining terests as a sideline. I had photographed objects of anything of which it has no previous knowledge. nature that attracted me whenever I had a chance, The only way to expand our minds is by gaining gradually accumulating a collection of photographs additional knowledge through further study of nature. that consider outstanding in two respects: in regard I 7 — to subject matter, because it is very comprehensive which, because of its high order of organization, is rocks and plants and animals photographed both aesthetically attractive. Or consider the nautilus shell outdoors on location and indoors under controlled depicted on page 79. As the animal grows, it adds conditions; and in regard to the way in which these new sections to its home; this is a perfectly functional objects are "seen," because my engineering back- process, the result of which, because of the geo- ground, art studies, and professional photographic metrical precision with which it is executed, strongly training enabled me to present them in what believe appeals to our sense of beauty. Or take the water- I is a particularly informative and, at the same time, worn pebbles shown on pages 30 and 31 : the longer aesthetically pleasing form. they have been processed—tumbled and ground This is the third time that I have published a col- against each other by the surf—the more geomet- lection of nature photographs in book form. My first rically perfect and hence beautiful their forms. It effort was The Anatomy of Nature, a picture-and-text is these aspects of nature—cause and effect, function, book of 168 pages published in 1956 by Crown form, beauty, and their interconnections—that form Publishers in New York. In 1966 The Viking Press the dominant theme of this book. published my second collection of nature photo- But in addition to the beauty ofthe function-derived graphs, Forms of Nature and Life, a larger and more form, another kind of beauty exists in nature which ambitious volume of 170 pages of pictures and 68 defies explanation. This kind of beauty expresses pages of text. Both books emphasized the scientific- itself in the geometrically precise ornamentation of documentary aspects of their subjects. shells, in the symmetrical designs of butterfly wings, In contrast to these earlier works, in the present and in the color shifts and changes of thin sections volume approach essentially similar objects from a of minerals seen in polarized light, to name only I different point of view—the viewpoint of the artist, some of its manifestations that immediately come to the poet, the dreamer, who sees a face in a piece of mind. As far as we know, this kind of beauty is not wood or a crucifix in the skull of a fish. This time related to function —the linear ornamentation of some I gave my imagination free rein, feeling that I had shells is straight-lined, of others curved, and in still proved with my other books that was capable of others takes the form of rows of dots, and there seems I producing high-quality documentary nature photo- to be no explanation why one is this way instead of graphs. As a result the present picture collection that. But the fact remains that designs of this kind are, should appeal primarily to readers in search of beauty almost without exception, extremely pleasing to the and the more fundamental aspects of our world. appreciative eye, conveying a kind of beauty that In the course of this work was struck again and transcends utilitarian aspects like camouflage or I again by the inextricable relationship of cause and mimicry and appeals directly to the mind and the effect, beauty, function, and form. To give some ex- heart. have seen and enjoyed innumerable examples I amples: The photograph on page 28 shows the maze of this transcendental kind of beauty and am happy 1 of tunnels which bark beetles carve out of wood. to be able to present some of them in this book. Because intersections would be detrimental to the consider this volume the equivalent of the sketch- I welfare of the grubs, these tunnels almost never book of the artist—a random collection of observa- cross one another, producing as a result a design tions, notations, impressions, conclusions, and 8
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