Diagrammatics

Two hundred and fifty favored subscribers received a bewildering book last week. Most of them strove earnestly to interpret it because of the prominence of its illustrator, pretty, dark-haired Maude Phelps Hutchins, wife of young President Robert Maynard Hutchins of the University of Chicago. Its title was Diagrammatics.

Chicago intelligentsia have long been aware of Mrs. Hutchins' psychological drawings, compositions of nude female figures drawn "with a blank mind," with no conscious effort, which she calls "dialectic" drawings.* At various parties last winter she showed them to friends, with a magic lantern and a typewritten manuscript of stage directions and remarks, while her friend Professor Mortimer Adler of her husband's psychology department attempted to clear things up by reciting explanatory poems in free verse. A typical Adler:

It is true that that which is true is true. It is false that that which is true is false. It is true that that which is false is false. It is false that that which is false is true. . . . But if it were true that that which is true is true, it could not be false that that which is false is false. Hence, were it true that this is false, it could be false that it is true, and yet this could be false.

Poems and drawings made up the book privately printed last week. Most popular of the dialectic drawings is one Mrs. Hutchins calls "An Apple a Day" (see-cut). At private performances this is shown in four positions, including upside down. Wrote Mrs. Hutchins on the edge of her manuscript after the first showing, "This caused a mild clapping for some reason."

To hardboiled booksellers Diagrammatics last week recalled Jacob Epstein's sketches, evidenced a talent for drawing (sculpture is Mrs. Hutchins' hobby), and the literary monotones of Gertrude Stein.

*Dialectics, in philosophy, is the syntax of reason, the branch of logic which teaches the rules of reasoning. The connection with Mrs. Hutchins' drawings is obscure.

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