Numbers in Love

Giacomo Balla, Numbers in Love, 1924

A Romance in Lower Mathematics

Martin Eder, La Mathematique du Slip, 2006

 A little more time

Felice Casorati, Gli scolari, 1928

Optional

 Erwin Olaf, The Classroom from Hope, 2005

 Mae West: "A man has one hundred dollars and you leave him with two dollars, that's subtraction."

 Diego Rivera, The Mathematician, 1919

 
What happens when you take 76 images of blowjobs (as in fellatio, as in oral sex), and mathematically average them? What you get is a blurry fuzzy picture. This usage of math in art is by Jason Salavon. He aptly calls it 76 Blowjobs.

 Max Ernst, Euklides, 1945

 Heaven and Hell

 Charles Demuth, The Figure 5 in Gold, 1928

 Reverse Notation

 Roberto Matta, The Un-Nominator Renominated (Le Dénommeur renommé), 1952

 Max Ernst, Mattamathics, 1948

 Margaret Bourke-White, Russian woman using an abacus to calculate numbers in business, 1938

Some numbers are positive

 El Lissitzky, Basic Calculus, 1928

 Advanced Calculus

Constance Haslewood, Multiplication is Vexation, from 'Old Mother Goose's Rhymes and Tales', published by Frederick Warne & Co., 1890s

 Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered? - Woody Allen

 Albrecht Dürer, Salvator Mundi

Both main dimensions, 14 and 17inches, encrypt  the title of the painting, and a variant of Dürer's signature:

SALVATOR MVNDI = (19+1+12+22+1+20+15+18)+(13+22+14+4+9) = 170

ALBRECHT DUERER = (1+12+2+18+5+3+8+20)+(4+21+5+18+5+18) = 140

Prof. Dr. Olga Holtz, Mathematician, Technical University Berlin (on loan from UC Berkeley)

Panic

Moscow 1968

Hedy Lamarr, the co-inventor of the Spread Spectrum - a way of protecting radio signals from being intercepted or corrupted - used in anything wireless these days. Hedy also had kind of a rocky love life. She married six times, finally settling down with her divorce lawyer. Beauty, talent, and brains. What a fabulous combination!

Got it? No?

George Tooker

George Tooker, Self-Portrait, 1947

George Tooker was born August 5, 1920, in Brooklyn, New York. He was the first child of a Cuban-American mother and a father who was a bond broker. The trajectory of his life began to manifest itself from the age of seven, when he began taking painting lessons from Malcolm Fraser, a family friend whose oeuvre was in the Barbizon tradition. Tooker began high school in Bellport, Long Island; however, his parents weren't much impressed with the quality of the school, and he spent his last two years at the more rigorously academic Phillips Academy, in Andover, north of Boston. He developed an intense dislike of the straight-laced school, with its orientation toward business and finance, and its concern that its students learn to hide their emotions. Tooker gravited instead toward the school's art studio, where he worked at landscape drawing and watercolors. By virtue of its location, Andover did furnish some additional, if unintended education: Tooker became aware of effects of the Depression on the mill towns north of Andover. He was angered by the sharp contrast between the comfortable lifestyle of the children of the economic elite who attended the academy, and the many unemployed.

George Tooker, The Artist’s Daughter, 1955

After graduation from Phillips in 1938, Tooker went on to Harvard, where he majored in English literature, that having been the only academic subject of interest to him at Phillips. Yet he spent much of his time at the Fogg Art Museum, and in the towns surrounding Boston, where he made watercolor sketches of the urban and rural landscapes. He also took up with some radical political organizations. It was during this time that he first became interested in the potential of art as a tool for social justice. Especially inspirational was the work of Mexican painters like David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jose Clemente Orozco.

George Tooker, Coney Island, 1947

Graduating from Harvard in 1942, Tooker decided to pursue his long-standing desire to study art. Securing his parent's support, he enrolled in the Art Students League in New York. Here he studied for two years with Reginald Marsh, Kenneth Hayes Miller (who also taught Edward Hopper), and Harry Sternberg. From the standpoint of influence, it cannot be entirely coincidental that all three of these artists were men of social conscience who expressed their concerns in their work.

George Tooker, Bathers, 1950

In 1944 Tooker met the painter Paul Cadmus. Cadmus was a painter who worked with egg tempera (using traditional Reanissance techniques), and transmitted this expertise to Tooker, whose use of this medium marks his mature style. A year later he moved to a flat on Bleecker Street in Greewich Village, New York. In 1949 Cadmus and Tooker spent six months travelling in Italy and France. In the same year Tooker met painter William Christopher, who was to become his life partner until Christopher's death in 1973.

George Tooker, The Waiting Room, 1959

In 1950 Tooker and Christopher moved into an illegal loft located at W. 18th St. Here, in order to support themselves, they made custom furniture. However, Tooker was beginning to earn both recognition and income from his art: the Whitney Museum bought his best-known painting, The Subway, that year. With greater means as their disposal, the two first bought and renovated a brownstone on State Street in Brooklyn Heights (1953), and then, in the late 50s, he and Christopher built a weekend home near Hartland, Vermont.

George Tooker, Subway, 1950

During the 1950s, Tooker painted some of the 20th century's most memorable images of modern angst. In Cornice, a young man on a high building ledge apparently contemplates escaping life's complexities for good. With its lost souls haunting the New York underground Subway (above) envisions modernity as a spiritual prison system. The Kafkaesque Government Bureau (below) pictures an office of seemingly infinite extent, where people wait like penitents at the windows of terminally unresponsive bureaucrats.

George Tooker, Government Bureau, 1956

In the wonderfully weird Highway (below), a man dressed entirely in black except for the red jewels dotting his belt holds up a gloved hand like a traffic cop to halt three strangely bulbous cars. In his other hand he wields a circular red reflector on a pole, hiding his face from our view. A set of white arrows on posts point straight downward, directing our thoughts, maybe, to the underground energies of the unconscious. 

George Tooker, Highway, 1953

The one-man shows in New York galleries picked up speed, taking place in 1960, '62, '64, and '67. Then it was time to give something back: he return to the Art Students League to teach himself from 1965 to 1968. However, at the end of this period, Christopher's health was beginning to deteriorate to such an extent that Vermont winters were too severe for him. They began a search for a home in Europe where they could winter over, and ultimately found an apartment in Malaga, Spain. Christopher died in Spain in 1973, and Tooker spent most of 1974 there, wrapping up disposition of his estate. Also in '73, a major survey exhibition of Tooker's work was organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. That exhibition traveled to Chicago, New York, and Indianapolis. Tooker still lives and works in Harland, Vermont.

George Tooker, Ward, 1970

Why Tooker never achieved the status of, let's say. Jackson Pollock is a puzzling problem. The obvious answer is that he was crowded away from the center stage of the New York art world by the sweeping success, critical and commercial, of Abstract Expressionism during the 1950′s and early 1960′s. Abstract Expressionism was extolled by Nelson Rockefeller as “free enterprise painting.” As the United States confronted the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the CIA-sponsored Congress for Cultural Freedom and other American cultural organizations promoted AbEx and jazz music to combat the Soviet’s Socialist Realism schools of art and literature. Some writers like Frances Stonor Saunders, in her book Who Paid the Piper?: CIA and the Cultural Cold War, contend that the CIA actually sponsored exhibitions of AbEx art in Europe.

Leap Before You Look

George Tooker, Cornice, 1949

 Leap Before You Look
by W.H. Auden

The sense of danger must not disappear:
The way is certainly both short and steep,
However gradual it looks from here;
Look if you like, but you will have to leap.

Tough-minded men get mushy in their sleep
And break the by-laws any fool can keep;
It is not the convention but the fear
That has a tendency to disappear.

The worried efforts of the busy heap,
The dirt, the imprecision, and the beer
Produce a few smart wisecracks every year;
Laugh if you can, but you will have to leap.

The clothes that are considered right to wear
Will not be either sensible or cheap,
So long as we consent to live like sheep
And never mention those who disappear.

Much can be said for social savoir-faire,
But to rejoice when no one else is there
Is even harder than it is to weep;
No one is watching, but you have to leap.

A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep
Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear;
Although I love you, you will have to leap;
Our dream of safety has to disappear.

Willi Baumeister

Oskar Schlemmer (left) and Willi Baumeister, Frankfurt 1929

Willi Baumeister (1889-1955) was born in Stuttgart, Germany. His father was a chimney-sweeper; his mother was the artistically talented daughter of a decorative painter. From her family Willi received his first artistic impulses. Already as a child his most prized toys were paper and pencil. Around age 16 he decided to study at the art academy but at his father's request first trained as a decorative painter from 1905 to 1907. Already during this apprenticeship he was admitted to the Königliche Akademie (Royal Academy Stuttgart). There he met Oskar Schlemmer with whom he cultivated a lifelong friendship.

 

Willi Baumeister, Self-Portrait in the Studio, 1911

In 1912, Baumeister studied for three months at the Cercle International des Beaux-Arts in Paris. After his return he moved into his first studio in Stuttgart. The next year he participated for the first time in an exhibition at the Gallery Der Sturm in Berlin, and in 1914 produced four wall pictures for the Cologne Werkbund Exhibition. From November 1914 to December 1918 Baumeister served in the First World War, which took him to the Balkan, Ukraine, and the Caucasus. Nonetheless, he also participated in exhibitions during the war years. In 1915 he met Oskar Kokoschka and the architect Adolf Loos in Vienna.

  Willi Baumeister, Readers under the Lamp, 1913

After the end of the war Baumeister resumed his studies at the Stuttgart Art Academy and completed them in 1922. In 1919, Baumeister joined the radical Artist Association Novembergruppe. At this time he began sketching stage and costume designs for performances at Stuttgart theaters and also turned to commercial graphics. Contacts in France - especially with Fernand Léger, with whom he exhibited in Berlin in 1922, and with Le Corbusier - made him known beyond German borders.

 Willi Baumeister, Female Runner II, 1925

In 1923, Baumeister met the artist Margarete Oehm whom he married in 1926. In 1924, his work was shown at a large exhibition of modern German art in Leningrad and Moscow. In 1926, he participated in an exhibition in New York and again traveled to Paris, which led to a large exhibition at the Galérie d'Art Contemporain in 1927. In addition, he produced the stage design for Händel's opera Ariodante for the Landestheater Stuttgart. Baumeister was also well received in 1927 at the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung (Great Berlin Art Exhibition) where he met Kasimir Malewitsch.

 

Willi Baumeister, Tennisspieler liegend, 1929

As a convinced representative of applied art, Baumeister joined the ring neue werbegestalter (circle of new commercial designers) in 1927 whose members included Kurt Schwitters and other famous German typographers. But the most important event for him - as for the entire European avant-garde - was the large 1927 Werkbund exhibition in Stuttgart with the famous Weissenhofsiedlung (Weissenhof Housing Settlement). Here, he not only designed numerous printed materials, but also furnished a number of rooms with his works. Through these activities Baumeister was called to the Municipal Applied Arts School (Städelschule) in Frankfurt am Main, where he had a professorship from 1928 to 1933. Initially hired as a lecturer for commercial graphics and typography he certainly would have welcomed taking on the painting class as well. This, however, was taught by Max Beckmann.

Willi Baumeister, Rope-Jumper, 1928

In 1930, Baumeister received the Württemberg State Prize for the painting Linienfigur (Line Figure). His December 1932 exhibition at Galerie Cassirer in Berlin would be his last exhibition in Germany until 1945. At the beginning of 1933 Hitler came into power, and he received notice without further explanation that his future teaching activity would be terminated. Following the dismissal, Baumeister returned to Stuttgart where he initially earned his living mainly with commercial graphics. Even though he was not subject to a work prohibition, public activity as an artist would be unthinkable. The situation right now has no prospects for us but I am solidly convinced that we will be needed one day and not the shallow canvas-knackers who bow to the authoritative opinion of the whole rabble, Baumeister wrote in a 1934 letter.

Willi Baumeister, Swimmers on the Ladder, 1929

In 1936, Willi Baumeister met the owner of the Wuppertal lacquer Factory, Dr. Kurt Herberts, and took a job at his company. There he worked alongside with other artists defamed by the National Socialist regime: Franz Krause, Alfred Lörcher, Georg Muche, and Oskar Schlemmer as well as art historian Hans Hildebrandt. In Herberts' firm it was necessary to research ancient and modern painting techniques. Between 1933 and 1944 five publications grew out of these investigations, which were published under Dr. Kurt Herberts's name - including 10,000 Years of Painting and its Materials. From 1943 to 1944 Baumeister wrote his manuscript Das Unbekannte in der Kunst (The Unknown in Art), which was first published in 1947.

Willi Baumeister, Painter with Palette, 1933

In 1937, Baumeister participated in a show of constructivist art in Basel. The same year, four of his pictures were displayed at the notorious Munich exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art). Concurrent to this Nazi propaganda show, he exhibited under the title Unabhängige Kunst (Independent Art) in Paris where he met his friends Fernand Léger and Le Corbusier. In 1938, Baumeister deposited a large number of pictures in the Kunsthalle Basel (to keep them out of reach from the National Socialists), and participated in the London exile exhibition Twentieth Century German Art.

   

Willi Baumeister, Book Cover: Modulation and Patina, 1944

In June of 1940, Paul Klee, whom Baumeister had greatly admired and whose art had strongly inspired him to the end, died. In 1941, Baumeister was prohibited to paint and exhibit. "It isn't easy to withstand the depressions of this time. This for seven years now. Presumably I can no longer show my pictures in exhibitions. I thus work exclusively for myself alone.", he wrote in his diary. Then, in April 1943, the death of Oskar Schlemmer hit him very hard: "While the bombs fell and the gunfire roared, I still especially remembered the late friend." (Diary).

Willi Baumeister, Chumbaba, 1954

In 1943 - the factory in Wuppertal and Baumeister's Stuttgart house were partially destroyed by bombs - he moved with his family to Urach in the Swabian Alp. In April 1945 he fled with his wife and daughters to the house of artist-friend Max Ackermann on Lake Constance to evade obligatory service in the Volkssturm (People's Storm) and a possible court martial. Already a few weeks after the war's end, Baumeister was engaged as director and teacher at the Stuttgart Art Academy. His reputation grew steadily. He exhibited throughout Europe, wrote numerous articles, taught, and participated on art juries.

Willi Baumeister with his daughters Felicitas and Krista, Stuttgart 1955

In 1950, the first so-called Darmstadt Dialogue took place. Baumeister participated in a discussion titled The Human Image of Our Time, along with well-known art historians such as Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub and Hans Sedlmayr, psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich, and philosopher Theodor Adorno. In 1954 Baumeister withdrew in protest from the German Artist Union, after belonging to its executive board since its new founding in 1950. Baumeister found that in an interview on non-representational painting, Karl Hofer had expressed a disparaging view. This was preceded by a polemic public debate between Hofer and art critic (and Baumeister biographer) Will Grohmann, a vehement advocate and promoter of abstract art.

Willi Baumeister, Deutscher Künstler Bund, Exhibition Poster, 1951

On August 31, 1955 Willi Baumeister died while at work on a painting. His death came unexpectedly - he was found sitting at the easel. You should visit his excellent official website.