Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye, The New Version, Second edition, Revised and Enlarged [Paperback]

Rudolf Arnheim (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 12, 1974 | ISBN-10: 0520026136 | ISBN-13: 978-0520026131 | Edition: 2nd

Since its first publication in 1954, this work has established itself as a unique classic. It applies the approaches and findings of modern psychology to the study of art; it descirbes the visual process that takes place when people create - or look at - works in the various arts, and explains how they organize visual material according to definite psychological laws. Artists, critics, art historicans, students, and general readers have found it a highly readable book. Now Arnheim has throughtly revised and enlarged the text and adds new illustrations, taking advantage of recent developments in his own work and that of others.

Editorial Reviews

Review

The clear, direct, flexible writing is powerfully reinforced by the numerous illustrations . . . not one of which is superfluous. -- Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

From the Inside Flap

"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 Fineberg, author of Art since 1940: Strategies of Being --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 508 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 2nd edition (September 12, 1974)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520026136
• ISBN-13: 978-0520026131
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #933,527 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

48 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Science meets art in Gestalt theory, March 9, 2001

By 

Steven Lehar (Manchester, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye, The New Version, Second edition, Revised and Enlarged (Paperback)

Rudolf Arnheim is one of those rare and exceptional thinkers gifted in both the arts and science, in this case the science of psychology. This book is about the relation between psychology and art. Its value will be immediately recognized by artists, as well as by those who are interested in how the mind makes sense of the visual world. But the most interesting and valuable aspect of this book is its implications for psychology. The Gestalt theory on which Arnheim's approach is based is a minority view in contemporary psychology, but it is a theoretical viewpoint that is destined for a renaissance. For Gestalt theory recognizes the holistic, emergent aspects of perception, which are so difficult to account for in terms of contemporary neuroscience, but are so clearly evident in the laws of artistic composition. Although this book was originally published in 1954, I believe it is only a matter of time before it receives the recognition it deserves as an invaluable contribution to psychology, as soon as psychology has the wisdom to recognize it as such.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Science meets art in Gestalt theory, March 9, 2001

By 

Steven Lehar (Boston MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye, The New Version, Second edition, Revised and Enlarged (Paperback)

Rudolf Arnheim is one of those rare and exceptional thinkers gifted in both the arts and science, in this case the science of psychology. This book is about the relation between psychology and art. Its value will be immediately recognized by artists, as well as by those who are interested in how the mind makes sense of the visual world. But the most interesting and valuable aspect of this book is its implications for psychology. The Gestalt theory on which Arnheim's approach is based is a minority view in contemporary psychology, but it is a theoretical viewpoint that is destined for a renaissance. For Gestalt theory recognizes the holistic, emergent aspects of perception, which are so difficult to account for in terms of contemporary neuroscience, but are so clearly evident in the laws of artistic composition. Although this book was originally published in 1954, I believe it is only a matter of time before it receives the recognition it deserves as an invaluable contribution to psychology, as soon as psychology has the wisdom to recognize it as such.

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the true gateway to perception, March 3, 2005

By 

Devrim PINAR "Art Director / Creative Designe... (Istanbul, Turkey) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye, The New Version, Second edition, Revised and Enlarged (Paperback)

If you want to learn why the things are seen in the way they are seen or want to control the look of your objects to build up as a concrete whole, wheter in a motion picture, a paint, a photograph, architecture, sculpture, a graphical design piece, or more strictly speaking, if you ever asked yourself what is a line, what makes a triangle more interesting than a square, why my piece of design looks unstable, and start to think that you are going mad :) this is the decisive beginning for understanding visual communication... Must be bought together with "The Power of the Center" for a complete look... Basics of geometry, psychology, philosophy and history of art are required...