Waddington, Charles H. Behind Appearance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970.

Abstract

It has often been pointed out that twentieth-century painting and physics share a common tendency toward probing behind appearances into the underlying structure of things; that the 'retreat from likeness' in painting is akin to science's peering far within the surface of matter. The results of their probings are also significantly similar: extradimensionality connects Cubism and relativity; and random, indeterminate processes occur both in recent expressionist painting and in quantum physics. But although the common culture implicit in these parallels has often been remarked, not until now has it been studied in depth and in detail. The author provides a concise summary of those aspects of modern science that relate to his theme, including the development of a 'third science' that embraces information, communication, automation, and systems theory. He also provides in parallel a concise history of the modern movement in painting. Treating only those artists whose work clearly illustrates his viewpoint, he divides those active before the Second World War into two broad groups, the Geometricizers (members of such movements as Cubism, Constructivism, and the Bauhaus), who sought to make manifest the essential form of reality; and the Magicians (including Chirico, Kandinsky, the Dadaists, and the Surrealists), who transformed reality in accordance with their own internally developed laws, Postwar reactions, continuations, and new starts, including some very recent trends, are then discussed. Waddington examines the art-science relationship at several levels that can be divided between the conscious connections made by painters who followed the development of twentieth-century physics and the unconscious (or natural) reflections in the work of artists of the new scientific description and schematization of nature (the most direct manifestation of this is the almost uncanny similarity between certain paintings and photographs of the micro-world that were achieved at the same time). Also examined are those artists working from the opposite direction: those who reproduce the exact surface appearance of man-made technological objects (like the Pop painters) rather than probe beneath the surface of nature, and as well those who produce 'plans' for psedomachines. In addition, the book presents a comparison of the self-conceptions of artists and scientists, and their professional attitudes toward their work. The book contains numerous reproductions of paintings; there are some 150 black and white halftones and about 70 color plates. There are also many verbal statements by painters on how they see the relation between their work and external reality. These quotations, like the author's own discussion, are at an analytical level well above the too-common, often nebulous 'art talk' in which a prose style attempts to analogize a painting style. In a concluding chapter, Waddington emphasizes that there are many self-contained sciences and many independent arts, in particular many equally valid ways of painting. A final synthesis of them all is not possible and might even be an undesirable reistriction on the variety and richness of life. Nevertheless, some connections are both possible and useful, and those between painting and science are stronger and more direct than those between literature and science.