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"In "The Ego and the Id "Freud argued that a cogent thought
process, to say nothing of conscious intellectual work, could not
exist amidst the unruliness of visual experience. Over the last
half century in a sequence of landmark books, Rudolf Arnheim has
not only shown us how wrong that is, he has parsed the grammar of
form with uncanny acuity and taught us how to read it."--Jonathan
Fineburg, author of "Art since 1940: Strategies of Being"
For thirty-five years Visual Thinking has been the gold standard
for art educators, psychologists, and general readers alike. In
this seminal work, Arnheim, author of "The Dynamics of
Architectural Form", "Film as Art", "Toward a Psychology of Art",
and "Art and Visual Perception", asserts that all thinking (not
just thinking related to art) is basically perceptual in nature,
and that the ancient dichotomy between seeing and thinking, between
perceiving and reasoning, is false and misleading. This is an
indispensable tool for students and for those interested in the
arts.
Die Kunst der Bildanalyse ist so alt wie die Kunst selbst. Arnheims
Anleitung zum Sehen ist aber immer noch so jung wie bei ihrem
ersten Erscheinen 1954. Kaum ein Buch hat Generationen von Lesern
so einfach und so grA1/4ndlich in die Welt der Kunst eingefA1/4hrt.
Kaum ein Buch schlug so seine Leser von Anfang an in ihren Bann.
Woran liegt dies? Arnheim ist in seinen Schriften ein immer
verstAndlicher Vermittler. An einfachen Beispielen beleuchtet er
behutsam und kritisch das Wechselspiel von Form und Farbe, Raum und
Licht, Bewegung und Gleichgewicht. Am Ende der LektA1/4re wird der
Leser kaum bemerkt haben, wieviel Material ihm prAsentiert worden
ist: von der Steinzeit bis zu Picasso.
Rudolf Arnheim has been known, since the publication of his
groundbreaking "Art and Visual Perception" in 1974, as an authority
on the psychological interpretation of the visual arts. Two
anniversary volumes celebrate the landmark anniversaries of his
works in 2009. In "The Power of the Center," Arnheim uses a wealth
of examples to consider the factors that determine the overall
organization of visual form in works of painting, sculpture, and
architecture. "The Dynamics of Architectural Form" explores the
unexpected perceptual consequences of architecture with Arnheim's
customary clarity and precision.
This essay is an attempt to reconcile the disturbing contradiction
between the striving for order in nature and in man and the
principle of entropy implicit in the second law of thermodynamics -
between the tendency toward greater organization and the general
trend of the material universe toward death and disorder.
Rudolf Arnheim has been known, since the publication of his
groundbreaking "Art and Visual Perception" in 1974, as an authority
on the psychological interpretation of the visual arts. Two
anniversary volumes celebrate the landmark anniversaries of his
works in 2009. In "The Power of the Center", Arnheim uses a wealth
of examples to consider the actors that determine the overall
organization of visual form in works of painting, sculpture, and
architecture. "The Dynamics of Architectural Form" explores the
unexpected perceptual consequences of architecture with Arnheim's
customary clarity and precision.
"More than half a century since its initial publication, this
deceptively compact book remains among the most incisive analyses
of the formal and perceptual dynamics of cinema. No one who cares
about film can afford to remain ignorant of its insights and
wisdom. As digital technology fundamentally alters motion pictures,
the lessons of Film as Art commend themselves as excellent
insurance against reinventing the wheel in the new media landscape
and hailing it as progress."--Edward Dimendberg author of "Film
Noir and the Spaces of Modernity
"After more than eight decades, Rudolph Arnheim's small book of
film theory remains one of the essential works in defining film
art, understanding film less as reproducing the world than as
opening up new possibilities for formal play and unexpected
imagery. Anyone serious about film, whether scholar, filmmaker or
simply a lover of cinema, must take Arnheim seriously."--Tom
Gunning, author of "The Films of Fritz Lang (2000) and "D.W.
Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (1994)
"An aesthetic theory based on the formal 'limitations' of the
medium, Arnheim's "Film as Art always provokes students in an age
of few limits and less formality, and they argue and engage this
classic text with unparalleled passion. Written in the wake of
sound's transformation of the cinema, Arnheim's essays are not only
central to understanding a major historical moment in theoretical
debates about what constitutes the 'essence' of film, but also are
a must read for anyone seeking a lucid, detailed, and rigorous
argument about how works of art emerge from expressive constraint
as much as expressive freedom."--Vivian Sobchack, author of "Carnal
Thoughts(California, 2004) and many other books of film criticism.
This is an English translation of Arnheim's ""Kritiken und Aufsatze
zum Film"", which collects both film reviews and theoretical
essays, most of them written between 1925 and 1940. Arnheim began
writing about film in the 1920s for a satirical magazine, ""Das
Stachelschwein"" and later became a film critic for ""Die
Weltbuhne"". His most important contributions to both magazines are
published here, including comments on the silent and early sound
period, incorporating some of Buster Keaton's films. The 30 essays
on film theory discuss elements of theory; early sound film;
production; style and content; and the relationship of film and the
state. The 56 critical pieces include Arnheim's thoughts on the
practice of film criticism, his reviews of German, American, French
and Soviet films, and his profiles of Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin,
Felix Bressart, Erich von Stroheim, and others.
Thousands of readers who have profited from engagement with the
lively mind of Rudolf Arnheim over the decades will receive news of
this new collection of essays expectantly.
In the essays collected here, as in his earlier work on a large
variety of art forms, Arnheim explores concrete poetry and the
metaphors of Dante, photography and the meaning of music. There are
essays on color composition, forgeries, and the problems of
perspective, on art in education and therapy, on the style of
artists' late works, and the reading of maps.
Also, in a triplet of essays on pioneers in the psychology of art
(Max Wertheimer, Gustav Theodor Fechner, and Wilhelm Worringer)
Arnheim goes back to the roots of modern thinking about the
mechanisms of artistic perception.
From the Introduction: The papers collected in this book are based
on the assumption that art, as any other activity of the mind, is
subject to psychology, accessible to understanding, and needed for
any comprehensive survey of mental functioning. The author
believes, furthermore, that the science of psychology is not
limited to measurements under controlled laboratory conditions, but
must comprise all attempts to obtain generalizations by means of
facts as thoroughly established and concepts as well defined as the
investigated situation permits. Therefore the psychological
findings offered or referred to in these papers range all the way
from experiments in the perception of shape or observations on the
art work of children to broad deliberations on the nature of images
or of inspiration and contemplation. It is also assumed that every
area of general psychology calls for applications to art. The study
of perception applies to the effects of shape, color, movement, and
expression in the visual arts. Motivation raises the question of
what needs are fulfilled by the production and reception of art.
The psychology of the normal and the disturbed personality searches
the work of art for manifestations of individual attitudes. And
social psychology relates the artist and his contribution to his
fellow men. A systematic book on the psychology of art would have
to survey relevant work in all of these areas. My papers undertake
nothing of the kind. They are due to one man's outlook and
interest, and they report on whatever happened to occur to him.
They are presented together because they turn out to be concerned
with a limited number of common themes. Often, but unintentionally,
a hint in one paper is expanded to full exposition in another, and
different applications of one and the same concept are found in
different papers. I can only hope that the many overlappings will
act as unifying reinforcements rather than as repetitions. These
papers represent much of the output of the quarter of a century
during which I have been privileged to live, study, and teach in
the United States. To me, they are not so much the steps of a
development as the gradual spelling-out of a position. For this
reason, I have grouped them systematically, not chronologically.
For the same reason, I did not hesitate to change the words I wrote
years ago wherever I thought I could clarify their meaning. Removed
from my original intimacy with the content, I approached the text
as an unprepared reader, and when I stumbled, I tried to repair the
road. In some instances, I recast whole sections, not in order to
bring them up to date, but in the hope of saying better what I
meant at the time. Some of the earlier papers led to my book, Art
and Visual Perception, which was written in 1951 and first
published in 1954- Sections of the articles on perceptual
abstraction, on the Gestalt theory of expression, and on Henry
Moore are incorporated in that book. Others continued where the
book left off, for instance, the attempts to describe more
explicitly the symbolism conveyed by visual form. The short piece
on inspiration provided the substance for the introductory chapter
on creativity in my more recent book, Picasso's Guernica. Finally,
in rereading the material, I was surprised to find how many
passages point to what is shaping up as my next task, namely, a
presentation of visual thinking as the common and necessary way of
productive problem solving in any human activity. Ten of the papers
in this book were first published in the Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism. To mention this is to express my indebtedness to the
only scholarly periodical in the United States devoted to the
theory of art. In particular, Thomas Munro, its first editor,
showed a great trust in the contribution of psychology. He made me
feel at home among the philosophers, art historians, and literary
critics whose lively propositions inhabit the hostel he founded and
sustained. To him, as well as to my friends of the University of
California Press, who are now publishing my fourth book, I wish to
say that much of what I thought about in these years might not have
been cast into final writing, had it not been for their sympathy,
which encouraged the novice and keeps a critical eye on the more
self-assured pro. There are a few scientific papers here,
originally written for psychological journals but free, I hope, of
the terminological incrustation that would hide their meaning from
sight. There are essays for the educated friend of the arts. And
there are speeches, intended to suggest practical consequences for
art education, for the concerns of the artist, and for the function
of art in our time. These public lectures are hardly the products
of a missionary temperament. In fact, I marveled why anybody would
go to a theorist for counsel, illumination, and reassurance in
practical matters. However, when I responded to such requests I
noticed, bewildered and delighted, that some of my findings pointed
to tangible applications, which were taken to be useful.
Rudolf Arnheim's great forte is his ability to illuminate the
perceptual processes that go into the making and reception of
artworks - painting, sculpture, architecture, and film. Over the
years, his pioneering mode of 'reading' art from a unique
scientific/philosophic perspective has garnered him an established
and devoted audience. That audience will take pleasure in Arnheim's
most recent collection of essays, one that covers a range of topics
and includes titles such as "Outer Space and Inner Space," "What Is
an Aesthetic Fact?," "As I Saw Children's Art," "Two Ways of Being
Human," "Consciousness - an Island of Images," and "From Chaos to
Wholeness." The notion of structure is Arnheim's guide in these
explorations. Most of the essays examine the nature of structure
affirmatively: how it comes about, its incentives and objectives,
its celebration of perfection. He is interested in how artists
grope for structure to shape powerful, enlightening images, and how
a scientist's search for truth is a search for structure. Writing
with enviable clarity, even when deploying complex arguments,
Arnheim makes it easy and exciting to follow him as he thinks.
America is not abundantly supplied with 'public intellectuals' such
as Rudolf Arnheim - to have his writings with us is cause for
celebration. 'The word 'structure' appears for good reason in the
title of this collection...Structure seems to be needed as an
arbiter wherever this civilization of ours is split by selfish
interests and fighting for either/or decisions. The essays want to
speak with the voice of reason, because they want to show how the
parts require the whole.'
In his last and most overarching essay on the subject, Rudolf
Arnheim encourages us to see the range of individuality in
children's drawings and to recognize the child's creation of
'significant form' as a way of bringing coherence to his or her
experience of the world. This groundbreaking book brings together
distinguished critics and scholars, including Rudolf Arnheim, to
explore children's art and its profound but rarely documented
history. The contributors address central questions of how children
use art to make sense of their experience and what really
constitutes visual 'giftedness' in children. They also cover such
topics as visual thinking, the influence of popular culture on
children's drawings, giftedness versus education in children's
drawings, process, and social interaction in drawing. Created to
accompany an exhibition on children's drawings, "When We Were
Young" features a stunning full-color gallery of drawings both by
famous artists such as Ingres, Van Gogh, Picasso, Miro, and Klee
when they were children and by extraordinary 'ordinary' children.
An annotated chronology, with synopses and more than a thousand
scholarly notes, offers a comprehensive survey of the literature
and history of child art from the thirteenth century to the
present. It includes essays by Rudolf Arnheim, Jonathan Fineberg,
Misty S. Houston, Olga Ivashkevich, Christine Marme Thompson, and
Elizabeth Hutton Turner.
Never before published essays by the widely admired psychologist of
art. Arnheim spiritedly asserts art's fundamental achievements.
Rudolf Arnheim has spent a lifetime analyzing the basic
psychological principles that make works of visual art meaningful,
stirring, indispensable, and lasting. But recent fashionable
attitudes and theories about art, he argues, are undermining the
foundation of artistic achievement itself.
The essays collected in this volume are written in his familiar,
careful, and solidly supported manner, but under present
circumstances they amount to a call to arms. Included is a series
of miniature monographs on a variety of great works of art. In
other essays, Arnheim uncovers enlightening perspectives in the art
of the blind, in architectural space, in caricature, and in the
work of psychotics and autistic children. He also presents new
scientific aspects on the psychology of art and widens our range of
vision by connecting art with language, literature, and religion.
For many years Rudolf Arnheim, known as the leading psychologist of
art, has been keeping notebooks in which to jot down observations,
ideas, questions, and even (after a stay in Japan for a year) poems
in the "haiku" pattern. Some of these notes found their way into
his books--known and prized the world over--such as "Art and Visual
Perception," "Visual Thinking," and "The Power of the Center" (see
list below). Now he has selected, from the remaining riches of his
notebooks, the items in this volume. The book will be a joy to
ramble through for all lovers of Arnheim's work, and indeed for
anyone who shares Arnheim's contagious interest in the order that
lies behind art, nature, and human life. It is a seedbed of ideas
and observations in his special fields of psychology and the arts.
"I have avoided mere images and I have avoided mere thoughts," says
Arnheim in the Introduction, "but whenever an episode observed or a
striking sentence read yielded a piece of insight I had not met
before, I wrote it down and preserved it." There are also glimpses
of his personal life--his wife, his cats, his students, his
neighbors and colleagues. He is always concrete, in the manner that
has become his trademark, often witty, and sometimes a bit wicked.
In the blend of life and thought caught in these jottings,
psychology and the arts are of course prominent. But philosophy,
religion, and the natural sciences add to the medley of
topics--always addressed in a way to sharpen the senses of the
reader who, sharing Arnheim's cue from Dylan Thomas, may accompany
him through "the parables of sun light and the legends of the green
chapels and the twice told fields of childhood."
All of Rudolf Arnheim's books have been published by the University
of California Press.
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