Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye. (1974) Rudolf Arnheim
Art and Visual Perception (the second edition is almost fifty years old) can be regarded as one of the classic works of the field. Arnheim’s book inaugurated the systematic application of Gestalt principles to the study of works of art (and architecture), continuing and developing the sporadic applications of Köhler, Koffka or Ehrenfels and considerably widening the scope of the problems investigated from the perception point of view. Aspects that have not benefited from an integrative aesthetical and psychological approach until then
were discussed and analysed in the volume. Such facets as the conditions in which perceptive whole – a visual pattern – can be identified and recognized as the image of something, the psychological character of the overlap, raccourci, deformation or the problems related to the significance of apparent movement, the stroboscopic effect, in dance and cinema are amongst the discussed subjects. For instance, these are aspects that were
never approached from such an integrative aesthetic and psychological perspective. Without setting up a new aesthetic, the volume provides the necessary basis for that aesthetic that tends to give its actions the rigor, univocal character and experimental foundation of theses formulated in exact sciences.
“Art may seem to be in danger of being drowned by talk. Rarely are we presented with a new specimen of what we are willing to accept as genuine art, yet we are overwhelmed by a flood of books, articles, dissertations, speeches, lectures, guides – all ready to tell us what is art and what is not, what was done by whom and when and why and because of whom and what. […] We have neglected the gift of comprehending things through our senses. Concept is divorced from percept and thought moves among abstractions. Our eyes have been reduced to instruments with which to identify and to measure; hence we suffer a paucity of ideas that can be expressed in images and an incapacity to discover meaning in what we see.”
Ioana Mădălina Moldovan, Universitatea Tehnică din Cluj-Napoca (UTCN)
Arnheim, Rudolf. Art and visual perception: A psychology of the creative eye. Univ of California Press, 1954.
ISBN: 9780520243835