Rudolf Arnheim

Art and visual perception : a psychology of the creative eye

Since its publication fifty years ago, this work has established itself as a classic. It casts the visual process in psychological terms and describes the creative way ones eye organizes visual material according to specific psychological premises. In 1974 this book was revised and expanded, and since then it has continued to burnish Rudolf Arnheims reputation as a groundbreaking theoretician in the fields of art and psychology.

On the Nature of Photography

particular work of particular artists. He wishes to know what human needs are fulfilled by this kind of imagery, and what properties enable the medium to fulfill them. For his purpose, the theorist takes the medium at its best behavior. The promise of its potentialities captures him more thoroughly than the record of its actual achievements, and this makes him optimistic and tolerant, as one is with a child, who has a right to demand credit for his future. Analyzing media in this way requires a very different temperament than analyzing the use people make of them. Studies of this latter kind, given the deplorable state of our civilization, often make depressing reading.

Inverted Perspective in Art: Display and Expression

The author draws renewed attention to inverted perspective because it can serve to illustrate two fundamentally different ways of interpreting pictorial form and it has found new applications in the art of our century. He analyzes several examples of artists’ works made in the past and in the present to show that the illusionistic doctrine is not well suited for dealing with formal features that contradict the optical projection of three-dimensional objects on a pictorial surface. He points out how such formal features enhance visual display and expression, which are the basic objectives of picture-making. L’auteur attire l’attention sur l’intérêt de la perspective inverse en ce qu’elle peut servir à illustrer deux manières fondamentalement différentes d’interpréter la forme picturale, et en ce qu’elle a trouvé dans l’art du vingtième siède des applications nouvelles. Il analyse plusieurs exemples d’œuvres artistiques anciennes et contemporaines afin de montrer que la doctrine de l’illusionisme ne peut s’appliquer à des éléments formeis contredisant la projection optique d’objets à trois dimensions sur une surface picturale. Il précise comment de tels éléments formeis mettent en valeur la manifestation visuelle et l’expression, qui sont les objectifs fondamentaux de la création picturale.

Perceptual Aspects of Art for the Blind

ness closely resembles that of the sounds of music. Musical sounds are pure dynamics, pure expression. Vision tells us that music is produced by sound-makers, but the music itself contains no such instruments. Music exemplifies the abstractness of the auditory world quite in general. The auditory world is limited to the activity of things, the voices of humans and animals, the noises of water and wind, the cracking and banging and whistling of materials manipulated by nature and humans. Therefore, as I mentioned, the auditory world is empty, reduced to ocThis content downloaded from 157.55.39.180 on Tue, 27 Sep 2016 04:32:52 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Art for the Blind 59 casional, mostly discontinuous signals. Whereas the visual world makes its presence constantly known and offers attractive targets and lures, sound appeals less to elementary attention. Fraiberg observes that the creeping of infants is motivated essentially by visual targets, things they want to reach, and that therefore children born blind will not creep unless they are given special incentives. Combine the auditory experiences, on which the blind so heavily depend for their knowledge of the outside, with the kinesthetic percepts reporting about the behavior of the body, and you get the sense of a thoroughly dynamic world, a world limited abstractly to action. But how about the equally indispensable knowledge of the objects performing the actions? The sense of touch, which informs sightless persons about the shape of things, does its work also in an entirely dynamic fashion. Touch lacks the abstractness of kinesthetic experience. It is geared to apprehending the presence of objects within bodily reach and to discovering their location, size, and shape. At the same time, however, its conscious dependence on the body hampers the kind of detachment from the self prompted by vision. To understand the difference between the self and the outer world is the primary task of human cognition. This achievement is necessarily delayed in the blind person because of the intimate haptic connection between the perceivers own body and the objects perceived by touch. The central position of the self, which in visual perception is counteracted by the direct awareness of an outer world organized around centers of its own, is much less contested in haptic experience. The body of the perceiver occupies the largest space in the narrow territory of tactile reach. The body is constantly alive with the network of tensions that keeps its activity present in consciousness, whereas the outer objects transmit no such kinesthetic aliveness. Even so, the perceivers self and the things it can touch are closely connected. From the base of the selfs body, arm and hand reach unmistakably outward toward the object to be conquered. And while the exploration supplies knowledge about the objective dimensions of the physical things under scrutiny, the gestural operations by which the information is obtained preserve their dynamic abstractness of reaching, searching, meeting, pressing, embracing, etc. Consequently, the properties of the haptically explored objects are perceived in an equally dynamic fashion. The hands moving toward, say, a clay vessel standing on the table are met first of all by an active resistance, an obstacle that blocks the path of the exploration. The belly of the vessel bulges forward and outward. As the fingers grip the neck and converge around it, they experience it as an active constriction, which then reverts into the gaping aperture on top. Such dynamic perception is not alien to the sense of vision either,2 but it is much more compelling when the haptic senThis content downloaded from 157.55.39.180 on Tue, 27 Sep 2016 04:32:52 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Language and the Early Cinema

The following short excerpt from Film [ 11 is all but unknown to the readers of the English version of the book as well as to those of the other translations. The edition of 1957, titled Film As Art [2], on which all these translations are based, was prepared by the author in the conviction that only the essential sections, dealing with the nature of the visual medium, were still relevant whereas much ofwhat had been observed in the infancy days of the sound film was no longer worth saying. A complete English version of the German original of 1932 had been published in 1933 by Faber and Faber in London in a translation by L. M. Sieveking and Ian F. D. Morrow but has vanished of course long ago even from most libraries. The following few pages, slightly retouched by the author, will give today’s readers a taste of the principles that governed discussions of the media in those early days.

PERCEPTION OF PERSPECTIVE PICTORIAL SPACE FROM DIFFERENT VIEWING POINTS

After referring briefly to the topological transformations perceived when paintings are viewed from positions other than the orthogonal, the author investigates a problem specific to pictures that are based on central perspective. Central perspective prescribes the distance at which a pictorial construction is projected correctly. But apart from distance, is there also a particular viewing point required for optically correct viewing? A problem arises because paintings are composed with the central vertical of the canvas as the base of reference. That center of the frontal plane coincides rarely with the vanishing point of one-point perspective; in two-point perspective no such coincidence is possible. The author shows that no particular viewing point is demanded by central perspective, and describes the optical and perceptual consequences of various viewing points. A work by Tintoretto is used to illustrate stylistic effects derived from the relation between the center of the composition and the focus of the perspective. The author concludes by referring to the difference between viewers conforming to the spatial experience suggested by a perspective construction and others perceiving the pictorial world ‘from the outside’.

Progress in Color Composition

The structural relations between pairs of tertiary colors are used to explore concord and discord in color composition. Recent demonstrations by Garau have extended these color relations to those between foreground and background, thereby enabling him to apply the structural relations between tertiaries to the conditions generating perceptual transparency. An example of paradoxical transparency in modern painting is given.

What do the eyes contribute

EDUCATION, AS FAR AS IT TAKES PLACE WITHIN the four walls of the schoolroom, must, by its very nature, stay at a distance from most of the events, objects, and purposes to which it refers. The world which education introduces to the child is represented by proxy. History lies in the past, foreign countries are beyond reach, social relations are replaced by the pushes and pulls within the team of pupils and teacher, and the usefulness of knowledge and skill cannot be demonstrated on the spot; it has to be accepted on trust. In the first grade of elementary school the teacher may take the class for a walk to show them the maple, the beech, and the elm. A few years later, the trees-if they are considered at all-have been reduced to words, statistics, line-drawings, photographs, chemical processes, and perhaps leaf samples. As education proceeds, it concentrates more and more on the two techniques of remote manipulation: words and numbers. The advantages and the drawbacks of this procedure, profoundly different from the way a cat teaches her kittens and a master teaches his apprentices, need not be rehearsed here. I mention the indirectness of education in school only to remind us that the transmission and conservation of experience are more vitally important in this region of life than in any other. For the psychologist this situation raises a number of fundamental questions, one of which will be subjected in this paper to the particular bias of a particular observer, namely, the question: What do the sensory experiences of sight contribute to understanding?

The art of psychotics

Incomprehensible art is a modern phenomenon of our civilization. We attribute it to the rather unique combination of two factors. There has been a splitting-up of our cultural heritage, by which commonly shared ideas have given way to private conceptions nurtured by special groups or individuals. Correspondingly the symbolic images representing these ideas have come to reveal their meaning only to the happy few. At the same time, however, our century has generated the democratic expectation that works of art be understandable to everybody, so that the kind of esoteric message that was confined in earlier periods to those able to receive it now faces the population as a whole, an audience unprepared for it. This gulf between art and its public became particularly apparent when the artist in his presentations estranged himself by an unfamiliar style of visual form, that is, when he deviated from the lifelikeness that citizens had come to expect from paintings or sculpture. In the past, a viewer of Botticelti’s Birth of Venus might have been unaware of the picture’s mythological and humanistic connotations, but he had little trouble deciphering and being moved by the airy figures his eyes saw; whereas the visual idioms of the modern artist stop the unprepared visitor at the very first step of his approach. Add to this the protective unwillingness of people at most other times and places to pay attention to any form of art not in conformity with their own. Incomprehensibility was no issue as long as one felt no urge to understand. In our own setting until a century ago it was possible to dismiss as barbarian not only the art of “primitive” tribesmen but also much of what came over from Asia. Similarly, as the art historian Georg Schmidt has pointed out, three “outsider” varieties of art were excluded from recognition: the folk art of the peintres nai;fs and the art work of children and mental patients (3, p. 28). It was taken for granted that inability and derangement made such products unfit for aesthetic consideration. The first attempts to understand and appreciate the art of the insane coincide with the first impact of modem art upon Western Europe. In 1872, Auguste Ambroise Tardieu, a Paris physician published a “medical-legal study of insanity,” in which he reproduced a drawing by a schizophrenic and pointed to the psychiatric and artistic interest of such work [15]. By that time, Impressionist painting was in full swing. A few years later, the Italian art historian Corrado Ricci published the first book on the art of children [ 141. The profound impression exerted by Japanese woodcuts and African sculpture around the turn of the century is well known. The art of Asia and Africa, although strange to Western eyes, derived of course from clearly established traditions of its own. A curious, very different problem was posed by the art work of psychotics and children and, to some extent, by folk artists. These products were all but untouched by the artistic climate of their setting. They seemed to burst into bloom from nowhere, created by untrained and uninfluenced laymen. Also professional artists, struck by mental illness, suddenly produced

Art Today and the Film

If the various arts of our time share certain traits and tendencies they probably do so in different ways, depending on the character of each medium. At first glance, the photographic image, technically committed to mechanical reproduction, might be expected to fit modern art badly—a theoretical prediction not borne out, however, by some of the recent work of photographers and film directors. In the following I shall choose a key notion to describe central aspects of todays art and then apply this notion to the film, thereby suggesting particular ways in which the photochemical picture responds to some aesthetic demands of our time.