Visual thinking in arts education: Homage to Rudolf Arnheim.

The influence of Arnheim's work on the author's research began with an experiment on the perception of visual balance. Two later research projects emerged from the profound influence of Arnheim's stance toward creation in the visual arts as a serious, cognitive endeavor. A series of meta-analyses were first conducted to test the claim that learning in the arts transfers to nonarts cognitive domains, but little evidence was found. Past research on the transfer hypothesis was found to be lacking because of its failure to assess learning in the parent domain. Therefore, a new research project was carried out to identify kinds of learning in the parent domain of visual arts. We identified eight thinking dispositions developed in serious visual arts classes, setting the stage for more plausible transfer studies. This study demonstrates that the visual arts inculcate basic skills in perception and cognition that exist both in the arts and sciences. All of the skills the authors describe can, with some modification, be transferred to the science laboratory. As Rudolf Arnheim has taught us, visual thinking is everywhere. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Rudolf Julius Arnheim (1904-2007).

Presents an obituary for Rudolf Julius Arnheim. Arnheim died on June 9, 2007, in Anne Arbor, Michigan, at the age of 102. His wife (née Mary Frame) died in 1999. He is survived by his stepdaughter Margaret Nettinga, of the Netherlands, two grandchildren, and a great-grandchild. His life spanned the social cataclysms that swept the last century. Of Jewish descent, he first fled the Nazis and then the Italian fascists before he came to America from England in 1940. On this continent, his skills as a scholar and teacher brought him much success. He applied his formidable knowledge of philosophy, literature, art history, and perceptual psychology to central questions about the visual arts. His work has fundamentally influenced practitioners in many related fields: the psychology of art, art history, aesthetics, art education, and the study of popular culture. His books and essays are known around the globe. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Under Siege: The Golden Mean in Architecture

Michael Ostwald briefly describes the Golden Mean and its history before examining the stance taken by a number of recent authors investigating the Golden Mean in architecture. He addresses the theories of Husserl, Derrida and Ingraham, who separately affirm that tacit assumptions about the relationship between geometric forms and other forms – say geometry and architecture – must be constantly questioned if they are to retain any validity.     

Figuring Mood: The Role of Stimmung in the Formal Approach of Heinrich Wölfflin and Alois Riegl

Roughly translatable as ‘mood’ or ‘atmosphere’, Stimmung plays a key part in the late-19th-century writings of German art historians Wölfflin and Riegl. Andrew Saunders , Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, studies the origins of the concept, which links rational perceptions of harmony with notions of emotional response. He examines the two writers' contrasting views of Stimmung in relation to the Baroque, and highlights its little acknowledged role in the inception of formalism.     

An invitation to visual thinking.

Presents commentary by Lauren S. Seifert, President of Division 10, regarding Rudolf Arnheim's contributions. The work of Gestalt psychologists, Arnheim's included, so permeates post-millennial thinking about visual abstraction that we, ironically, scarcely recognize their contributions, as such. Some contemporary psychologists might be under the impression that Gestalt psychology had a brief and limited effect on the field, which has now abated. Psychology in the 21st century might even suffer from source amnesia regarding key aspects of our thinking about: (1) how sensation becomes abstracted into perceptual categories, and (2) how perceptual categories or worked and reworked into representational concepts. Psychologists who study artists and their work understand how remarkable it is to observe evidence of this lurching forward from sensation, to perceptual abstractions (and their interplay with other abstractions), and then, onto beautiful representations. This issue of Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts embodies an expressive representation of Arnheim's contributions, which began long ago in Arnheim's own writings, moved forward as communications in aesthetics (by many scholars and including the symposium to honor him at the APA), and advanced to a truly beautiful, expressive representation of genuinely splendid ideas (e.g., in this issue). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Rudolf Arnheim's contribution to Gestalt psychology.

Gestalt psychology was the foundation of Rudolf Arnheim's approach to art. Reviewing Arnheim's long and productive career, it becomes useful to assess his relationship to the evolving theory. By paying special attention to the issues of (1) perceptual abstraction and visual thinking, (2) perceptual dynamics and expression, and (3) perceptual "goodness" and beauty, it can be seen the degree to which Arnheim actually altered the basis of the general theory of Gestalt psychology, affirming the centrality of art in its purview. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Hungary: the organic and the rational traditions

The most memorable architectural images of the early 1990s were those of the organic architecture of Imre Makovecz. With their extraordinary, Expressionist timber forms, they encapsulated for the West the romantic possibilities of the architecture that lay behind the former Iron Curtain. Edwin Heathcote, who in 1997 wrote a monograph on Imre Makovecz for Academy Editions, here explains why ‘the organic’ counterpoised by ‘the rational’ has continued to provide such a rich dialogue for contemporary Hungarian architecture. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Obituary for Rudolf Arnheim (1904-2007).

Presents an obituary for Rudolf Arnheim. That Rudi was going to become a psychologist was not preordained, let alone that he would become the most important psychologist of art of the 20th century. Indeed, his father was a manufacturer of pianos and the expectation was that Rudi would enter the family business. Recoiling at this preordination, Rudi attended the University of Berlin, where he studied philosophy, psychology, music, and art. He had the good fortune to work with Max Wertheimer, perhaps the most gifted and imaginative of the three founders of Gestalt psychology. Rudi's doctoral dissertation, submitted in 1928 when he was but 24, was an empirical study of what could be learned from handwriting analysis. Thus Rudi began a lifelong fascination with how one perceived the visual world and how the act of perception is infused with--and inseparable from--cognition and the making of meaning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Brief Encounter: A Reminiscence Touching on Margaret Bourke‐White

In the 1890s photographers began making artistic portraits of their subjects in the home environment. These contrasted to the stiff studio portraits that were standard at the time; key elements were casual poses and natural lighting. For the next few decades, amateur artistic photographers (pictorialists) and professionals freely interacted and both aggressively pursued making home portraits. Realising a large market, publishers issued books on the subject and manufacturers produced specialised equipment.