Tetrascroll: Goldilocks and the Three Bears : A Cosmic Fairy Tale

A series of twenty-one original triangular lithographs (with narrative captions) which may be displayed in a helical scroll of linked tetrahedra. They were executed during the years 1975 and 1976 under the guiding light of Tatyana Grosman (to whom Fuller had been introduced by Edwin Schlossberg) at her ULAE print workshop in West Islip, Long Island. In something of a publishing innovation this trade book was brought out concurrently with a limited edition of the signed original lithographs. Michael Denneny was the editorial impresario at St. Martin's and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts handled the exhibition of the lithographs.

Fuller composed the Tetrascroll between the publication of Synergetics in 1975 and Synergetics 2 in 1979. He had been frustrated by the rigid structure of the synergetics books which, despite certain advantages, he felt robbed the work of spontaneity and narrative force. To compensate for this Fuller worked feverishly on the Tetrascroll as a free-form obbligato to the synergetics books. He explained to me at the time, "The empirical, the scientific way to present the argument of synergetics is the way I am doing it in Goldilocks.

Description by Ed Applewhite, courtesy of The Estate of Buckminster Fuller