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NEW ESSAYS O N THE
PSYCHOLOGY OF ART
R U D O L F ARNHEIM

New Essays
O N THE

Psychology of Art

U N I V E R S I T Y OF C A L I F O R N I A PRESS
Berkeley Los Angeles London
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 1 9 8 6 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Arnheim, Rudolf.
NEW ESSAYS ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ART.

Includes index.
1 . Art—Psychology, 2. Visual perception. I. Title.
N71.A675 1986 701'. i'5 85-1061
ISBN 0 - 5 1 0 - 0 5 5 5 3 - 5
ISBN 0—52.0—05554—3 (pbk.)

Printed in the United States of America

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
 To John and Marie Gay
Artists and Loyal Companions
CONTENTS

FOREWORD IX

Parti

Concerning an Adoration 3

Part II
The Double-Edged Mind: Intuition and the Intellect 13
Max Wertheimer and Gestalt Psychology 31
The Other Gustav Theodor Fechner 39
Wilhelm Worringer on Abstraction and Empathy jo
Part III
Unity and Diversity of the Arts 65
A Stricture on Space and Time y8
Language, Image, and Concrete Poetry 90
On the Nature of Photography 102
Splendor and Misery of the Photographer 115
The Tools of Art—Old and New 123

Part IV
A Plea for Visual Thinking 135
Notes on the Imagery of Dante's Purgatorio 153
viii / CONTENTS

Inverted Perspective and the Axiom of Realism 159

Brunelleschi's Peepshow 186
The Perception of Maps 194

PartV
The Rationalization of Color 205
Perceptual Dynamics in Musical Expression 214

Part VI
The Perceptual Challenge in Art Education 231
Victor Lowenfeld and Tactility 240
Art as Therapy zjz

Part VII
Style as a Gestalt Problem 261
On Duplication 274
On the Late Style 285

Part VIII
Objective Percepts, Objective Values 297

INDEX 327
FOREWORD

A F T E R THEIRscattered and sometimes inconspicuous first appearances

in various periodicals, the essays that follow have returned for a family
reunion. This gives them a new lease on life, but it also makes for sub-
stantial changes.
Articles in professional journals profit from a permanence of their
own, albeit one tied to the time of publication. A discipline grows like a
tree, one on which the nature and function of every new twig is deter-
mined by its place in the whole. Each contribution justifies itself by ad-
dressing a question that the profession has put on the agenda at that
time. Later workers along the same line dutifully cite their forerunners
by name and date, with the implication that the passage of time equals
progress, and that the pioneers of today stand on the shoulders of yester-
day's dwarfs. Everybody profits from the safety of the totem pole.
The advantages for organized research are obvious, but the system
also imposes constrictions that are not everybody's dish. It has not been
mine, partly by temperament and partly because for a lifetime I have
barked up more than one tree. Nobody can hope to make sense of a field
of study without being aware in a general way of current questions and
answers; but I have always drawn my references from wherever I hap-
pened to find them, from the wise men of antiquity as readily as from
last year's crop of publications; and I have picked my questions from the
puzzles I encountered on my own road. In consequence, my papers tend
to look like mavericks in the company in which they first appear and
reveal their raison d'être only when they are allowed to come home and
complement one another.
This is particularly true because these papers stand on an expanse of
X / FOREWORD

ground that has been parceled out among the professions. It is only nat-
ural that at a time when in each field the quantity of facts and theories
to be known is increasing fearfully, the psychologists, the art historians,
the educators, the therapists, and even the free-wheeling philosophers are
driven to cultivating their own gardens. Not that what I have been grow-
ing in mine is less particular; it's just that I have tried to breed a specialty
from what looks like a bunch of hybrids.
Two decades ago, my faithful and patient publishers issued a first
collection of my essays, Toward a Psychology of Art. What was then a
new specialty is now more nearly established. But rather than attempt to
survey the field of the psychology of art systematically, I have continued
my forays into particular problematic regions that have stirred my curi-
osity. Intent simply on clarifying in each case what the topic required, I
found myself sharpening certain basic principles and exploring the range
of their application. It is in the nature of the present collection of articles,
however, that instead of dominating the book as conspicuous headings,
these principles are everywhere implied. Their omnipresence surprised
me when I gathered the material and looked at it as a whole. It is my
hope that these pervasive reappearances of guiding themes will not be
seen as so many repetitions, bound to annoy the reader, but as the ties
by which the various observations would be fastened together were they
given their place in the edifice of thought in which they belong.
What would such an edifice look like? It may be worthwhile here to
give a brief sketch of it if the reader will tolerate the abstract formula-
tions that are inevitable in condensed accounts of theory. My main con-
cern continues to be epistemological; that is, I study the mind's cognitive
dealings with the world of reality. From the beginning I have been con-
vinced that the dominant instrument of those dealings is sensory percep-
tion, especially visual perception. Perception turns out to be not a me-
chanical recording of the stimuli imposed by the physical world upon the
receptor organs of man and animal, but the eminently active and creative
grasping of structure. This grasping of structure is accomplished by the
kind of field process that has been analyzed in gestalt psychology. It
serves to provide the organism not only with an inventory of objects, but
primarily with the dynamic expression of shapes, of colors, and of mu-
sical tones. Pervasive perceptual expression makes the arts possible.
Cognition through perceptual field processes—that is my way of de-
fining intuition, which functions with the secondary but indispensable
help of the intellect. The intellect complements intuitive synopsis with
networks of linear chains of concepts. Consequently, its principal tool is
 FOREWORD / xi

verbal language, consisting of chains of signs that stand for abstractions.

One can fully acknowledge the importance of language, yet refuse to
share the currently fashionable infatuation that burdens words with un-
reasonable responsibilities. Together, intuition and the intellect produce
thinking, which is inseparable from perception in the sciences as well as
the arts.
The organizational principles that govern perception in the nervous
system and its reflections in consciousness are one of the three constitu-
ents of human cognition. The second is the objective structure of physical
reality as conveyed to the mind through the senses. To this objective
structure art, science, and the common sense of practical life strive to do
justice. In emphasizing the objective conditions of reality, I try to coun-
teract the destructive effect of philosophical relativism. In particular I
have explored the properties of space and time experiences in their rele-
vance to the arts.
The third constituent of cognitive activity is especially pertinent to
the arts. It has to do with the properties of the media through which
cognitive experience takes shape. In my analyses of the media I point to
the many misunderstandings that arise, especially in the interpretation of
nonrealistic artforms, when, for example, traits of pictures deriving from
the character of two-dimensional representation are attributed to phe-
nomena observed in natural space. Visual representations are not manip-
ulations of nature but equivalents furnished with the facilities of the me-
dium.
These and other guiding ideas continue to develop as they come and
go in the essays of this book. In reviewing the text of the selections, I
have kept them as independent of one another as they were in their orig-
inal conceptions. Yet simply as a result of my dealing with them together,
I began to look differently at some of their aspects. This led to many
changes, some minor, some substantial. I have never considered my writ-
ings immutable, but thought of them more nearly as records of an on-
going struggle for more light. Perhaps instead of being caught in the fi-
nality of printed books, such records should be kept on one of those
newfangled screens that permit an author to change his mind and his
words for the better as long as he is around.

R.A.
Ann Arbor, Michigan
1984
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