Every single time I go to the beer store for Bass the guy says "Did you know that the Bass triangle is the oldest surviving registered trademark?" The first time he asked me I did not know. Apparently it was registered in 1876. My friend Sandra Rechico pointed out to me that Édourard Manet's "A Bar at the Folies-Berge" (1882), features said logo prominently. That Manet was such a pop artist! Leonard Shlain, in his book Art and Physics, talks about Manet's choice to muck around with perspective, obscuring the vanishing point, curving the horizon line, eliminating the middle ground, and flattening the picture plane. According to Shlain, these innovations contributed to a message from the artworld, "warnings to the public that the Western paradigms [ie: Euclid] about space, time and light were about to change." Shlain's connections between art and science are a bit thin, based pretty much solely on chronology. But it is interesting to see these parallel histories on the same page. Besides, this chapter was an excuse to indulge in the somewhat guilty pleasure of looking/thinking again at paintings by Manet. Édourard Manet, "Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, " (1863) (NB: bigger version moved to comments - scroll down) - sally mckay 3-31-2004 5:09 am

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