Impossibles

Arnheim writes about the cultural history of perspective and foreshortening in two dimensional representations of three-dimensional space. He writes about such representation as a paradox, whereby there are “appropriate and inappropriate ways of reading pictorial representations of space, and that the proper way is determined in each case by the style of a given period or developmental stage (134).” This painting, Impossibles, by Josef Albers plays with the viewer’s tendency to read depth, even when such a reading would be physically impossible. The viewer, based on a cultural familiarity with perspective, interprets this painting as two three-dimensonal cylinders even though the cylinders show contradictory and impossible points of view. It took me a long time to visualize this painting in two-dimensions without imposing depth; the left cylinder emphasizing circles and the right emphasizing ovals. Note the way that Albers uses larger shapes in the top half of the painting in order to balance the bottom-heavy effect.