(It depends for much of its vitality on our participation.) Its lessons relate to life as much as to art and if we learn them properly we shall ha better adapted to master the world as it presents itself to that prodigious but fallible apparatus, the human eye and brain. The show is fun to look at and fun to take part in. And if the mechanics of perception are often shown in the simplest possible form, there is usually a masterpiece of European art somewhere on hand to show to what effect those mechanics can be put into action. As to the relationship of eye to brain, Leonardo da Vinci is the star witness. If we are talking about color, Sir Isaac Newton comes back from the grave and encourages us to press the button that sets his color disk in motion, producing white light (or something quite like it) from all the colors of the spectrum. Professor Gombrich takes off from Plato, and from that point onward the company is almost oppressively grand. Gombrich, author of the perpetual best seller, “The Story of Art,” and by Roland Penrose, who for 50 years had been a part of the modern movement in Europe. On the fine‐art side, it was readied by E. Devised and first presented by the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, it had the benefit of the best possible scientific advice. It has elements of fairground and casino, classroom and conjuring. Mechanical toys, visual jokes, arcane references to the animal world, and a quick new look at many a famous work of art all play a part in it. to 6 P.M.) it is not “an art exhibition” in the conventional sense. (The Cultural Center is open Wednesdays through Sundays from 1 P.M. The mechanics of many forms of it are set out in a big‐scale exhibition called “Illusion in Nature and Art,” which has just opened at the New York Cultural Center on Columbus Circle and will he on view there through Aug.

So the whole subject of illusion is a complicated one. We remember that many of the supreme human achievements have been the work of people who found themselves “under an illusion” and turned it to great account.

If people really died all over the stage at the end of “Hamlet,” the police would be around before the manager could get the curtain down what happens at that somber moment is that we enter into a shared illusion in the knowledge that it will be worth our while. It's only an illusion.” We will tell him that what we have experienced is not an illusion at all but the reorganization of our collective experience on the level of an all‐comprehending reality.įor it is true beyond all doubt that illusion can coexist with the loftiest and most beneficent form of reality. If we get so absorbed in reading “War and Peace” that all other preoccupations fall away, we will not thank the friend who says, “Don't fool yourself. And illusion in art, drama, poetry and the novel still makes it possible for us to lead a parallel existence from which many a useful lesson can be drawn. Yet illusion was once thought of as primarily benign: a magical state from which much good could come. “You are under an illusion” is by contrast a polite way of saying, “You're a mess.” The man who says of himself, “I have no illusions,” is putting himself forward as a good man to have on our side in times of trouble. In everyday life, the word “illusion” now has implications of error and disparagement, weakness and eventual impotence. An exercise in visual perspective at the Cultural Center

Art of illusion gallery