Lawrence Weschler

ONE: Picturing Ad Reinhardt

TWO: Morgan Meis on experiencing Robert Irwin’s acrylic columns

THREE: Three: Stereo Sue’s first letter to Oliver Sacks on Stereoscopic Vision

As many of you will have by now heard, the artist Robert Irwin, my dear longtime friend (coming on almost fifty years now) and in many ways my originary subject (the principal, for starters, of my very first book, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, from back in 1980, with a second edition in 2007) died peacefully last Wednesday, at age 95, his wife Adele at his side, following a short illness. I’d visited with him myself the week before at his hospital bedside in La Jolla, where he drifted in and out of copresence, though at moments he grew piercingly, almost achingly himself.

As the folks at Christie’s are delighted to point out, it marks the only time Hockney combined two of his most popular subjects: a swimming pool, that is, in the context of a double portrait. For indeed, swimming pools had transfixed Hockney ever since he first arrived (out of cold grey Northern England) in sunny Los Angeles, in 1964, and, as with so much else about LA, the young artist began seeing, as if for the first time, the artistic potential in things which everyone else in the Southland had been taking for granted.

Because “Inventing” is the precise word, for, as Brosterman elaborates, it’s not as though kindergarten always existed. It had to be invented and it even had an inventor. For most of European history, no one had bothered educating children before the age of seven, as it wasn’t until around that age that one might be confident they would survive into adulthood, so why bother? By the 1830s, however, it was becoming clear that if kids had made it to age four, they’d likely make it altogether; and this realization had a catalyzing effect on one German educator in particular, a charismatic crystallographer, of all things (and how often does one get to use those two words in one phrase?), named Friedrich Froebel.

Over the next several decades (through his death in 1852), Froebel elaborated an ever more specific theory and practice for the deployment of kindergartens (his term), small schools for children starting around age four, in which the kindergartners were the teachers—the gardeners of children—and the gardening took the form of guided free play: no tests, no drills, no grades, not even any reading, ‘riting, or ‘rithmetic. Just patterns and patternings (remember, Froebel started out as a crystallographer): a sequential exposition of and exposure to form and the formful.