The Yale emeritus professor of Statistics Edward Tufte has in forty years published five admirable volumes on visual explanations. Written, designed, edited, and published by himself, this pentalogy has earned him the monikers ‘Galileo of graphics’ (Bloomberg) and ‘Leonardo da Vinci of data’ (NYT).
With these credentials, I recommend it to anyone interested in the graphic presentation of data and ‘the thinking eye.’ Already in the first book he proposed extending to our days the graphic statistics pioneered in the 19th century by William Playfair, Charles-Joseph Minard, and Étienne-Jules Marey, whose Paris-Lyon train schedules appear on the cover; Minard is the book’s hero, along with the John Snow who mapped London’s 1854 cholera outbreak. The next titles return to the same issues with a different emphasis, and Playfair, Minard, Marey, and Snow reappear, sharing graphic protagonism with dance notations, typographical considerations, the artistic genealogies of Alfred Barr or Ad Reinhardt, the beauty of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Galileo’s moon drawings, Yehudi Menuhim’s annotations on a Bach score, Steinberg’s drawings, Apollinaire’s calligrammes, or Feynman’s diagrams, reproduced on the final volume’s cover.
Tufte quotes Pugin through Venturi (“it is all right to decorate construction, but never construct decoration”) in support of his defense of graphic minimalism against ornamental exuberance, and in the second and fifth tomes he analyzes two works by Maya Lin, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington and the Women’s Table at Yale, commending the abundant data they contain despite the laconic language. In the past two decades the author has directed all his energy towards the construction of monumental sculptures, a hundred of which are displayed in a 95-hectare estate in Connecticut: a move that explains the increased presence of art in the last two volumes. The actual sculptures shown in these final editions are puzzling, but one who prefaces his last book with ‘the thinking eye’ is forgiven for everything.
