New Essays On The Psychology Of Art

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.

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.

Psychology.

Perception of expression distinguishes our cognitive activity in a pervasive, significant and peculiar way, and manifests itself paradigmatically in the vast world of artistic production. Art and Expression examines the cognitive processes involved in artistic production, aesthetic reception, understanding and enjoyment. Using a phenomenological theoretical and methodological framework, developed by Rudolf Arnheim and other important scholars interested in expressive media, Alberto Argenton considers a wide range of artistic works, which span the whole arc of the history of western graphic and pictorial art. Argenton analyses the representational strategies of a dynamic and expressive character that can be reduced to basic aspects of perception, like obliqueness, amodal completion, and the bilateral function of contour, giving new directions relative to the functioning of cognitive activity. Art and Expression is a monument to the fruitful collaboration of art history and psychology, and Argenton has taken great care to construct a meaningful psychological approach to the arts based also on a knowledge of pictorial genres that allows him to systematically situate the works under scrutiny. Art and Expression is an essential resource for postgraduate researchers and scholars interested in visual perception, art, and gestalt psychology.

Domesticating the Invisible examines how postwar notions of form developed in response to newly perceived environmental threats, in turn inspiring artists to model plastic composition on natural systems often invisible to the human eye. Melissa S. Ragain focuses on the history of art education in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to understand how an environmental approach to form inspired new art programs at Harvard and MIT. As they embraced scientistic theories of composition, these institutions also cultivated young artists as environmental agents who could influence urban design and contribute to an ecologically sensitive public sphere. Ragain combines institutional and intellectual histories to map how the emergency of environmental crisis altered foundational modernist assumptions about form, transforming questions about aesthetic judgment into questions about an ethical relationship to the environment.

This collection of essays by Rudolph Arnheim (film criticism, U. of Michigan) explores film theory, criticism, and many classic films from the silent and early sound period (the 1920s and early 1930s). The majority of essays included in this collection were written and published in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, and have been translated into English for the first time. Arnheim argues that up until 1930, film artists created pure forms of cinema crafted with a narrative economy which could unify the most varied of effects. As movies became more realistic looking due to technical advances, cinema began to lose its integrity and viability. Paper edition (unseen), $18.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Art has the capacity to shape and alter our identities. It can influence who and what we are. Those who have had aesthetic experiences know this intimately, and yet the study of art’s impact on the mind struggles to be recognized as a centrally important field within the discipline of psychology. The main thesis of Art and Identity is that aesthetic experience represents a prototype for meaningful experience, warranting intense philosophical and psychological investigation. Currently psychology remains too closed-off from the rich reflection of philosophical aesthetics, while philosophy continues to be sceptical of the psychological reduction of art to its potential for Subjective experience. At the same time, philosophical aesthetics cannot escape making certain assumptions about the psyche and benefits from entering into a dialogue with psychology. Art and Identity brings together philosophical and psychological perspectives on aesthetics in order to explore how art creates minds.