This faculty of touch, called the “haptic” sense by the 
Greeks, was popularized as such by the Bauhaus program of 
sensuous education, through the work of Paul Klee, Walter 
Gropius, and many others in the Germany of the 1920s. The 
sense of touch, as offering a kind of nervous system or organic 
unity in the work of art, has obsessed the minds of the artists 
since the time of Cézanne. For more than a century now artists 
have tried to meet the challenge of the electric age by investing 
the tactile sense with the role of a nervous system for unifying 
all the others.

     Paradoxically, this has been achieved by “abstract art,” 
which offers a central nervous system for a work of art, rather 
than the conventional husk of the old pictorial image. More and 
more it has occurred to people that the sense of touch is 
necessary to integral existence. The weightless occupant of the