Last update: May 2004

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Publications in Visual Arts & Representation :

• Arnheim, Rudolf:
  • Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye, 1974.
  • Entropy and Art - an Essay on Disorder and Order, 1971.
  • New Essays on the Psychology of Art, 1986.
  • The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts, 1988.
• Leyton, Michael:
  • Chapter 8 in "Symmetry, Causality, Mind", 1992.
• Willats, John :
  • Art and representation : new principles in the analysis of pictures, 1997.

BibTeX references.

PDF file of Notes/extracts from Arnheim's masterpiece (in progress).

Bibliography @ LookSmart:

• Sciences > General Science > Famous Scientists > Psychologists > Rudolph Arnheim  

Bibliography at Leonardo on-line:

• http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/Leonardo/isast/spec.projects/arnheimbib.html

Biography : "The Little Owl on the Shoulder of Athene".

From Verstegen, Ian (http://astro.temple.edu/~iversteg/Arnheim.html) :

• "Rudolf Arnheim is one of the most important scholars to advance a psychological approach to aesthetics. After training in experimental psychology at the University of Berlin in the 1920s, he did pioneering work on film and radio in Germany and Italy. Fleeing Nazism in Germany and fascism in Italy, he settled into American academics where he applied his training in gestalt psychology to art. He taught most of his career at Sarah Lawrence College (1946-1968) while he was also on the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research. During this period he wrote Art and Visual Perception (1954). In 1968 he was invited by Harvard University to occupy a chair in the Psychology of Art. At Harvard he wrote Visual Thinking (1969), a more broadly based exploration of thinking in general. Finally, Arnheim retired to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he was visiting professor at the University of Michigan. Since his "retirement," Arnheim has written tens of articles and several books - continuing to publish up to this very day."
• More on Arnheim: "The Thought, Life and Influence of Rudolf Arnheim" :
  • http://astro.temple.edu/~iversteg/Gestalt.html

Text on-line:

• http://acnet.pratt.edu/~arch543p/readings/Arnheim.html

In this text, the author presents a radical theory of pictures. To do this, he has developed a precise vocabulary for describing the representational systems in pictures - the ways in which artists, engineers, photographers, mapmakers and children represent objects. His approach is derived from recent research in visual perception and artificial intelligence and he begins by clarifying the key distinction between the marks in a picture and the features of the scene that these marks represent. The methods he uses are thus closer to those of a modern structural linguist or psychoanalyst than to those of an art historian. Using over 150 illustrations, Willats analyzes the representational systems in pictures by artists from a wide variety of periods and cultures. He then relates these systems to the mental processes of picture production and shows how Greek vase painters, Chinese painters, Giotto, icon painters, Picasso, Paul Klee and David Hockney have put these systems to work. The book is also concerned with why artists from different periods and cultures have used such different systems and why drawings by young children look so different from those done by adults. Willats argues that the representational systems can serve many different functions beyond that of merely providing a convincing illusion. He then concludes that art historical changes, and the developmental changes in children's drawings, are not merely arbitrary, nor are they driven by evolutionary forces; rather, they are determined by the different functions that the representational systems in picture can serve.

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