Visual Thinking - 35th Edition by Rudolf Arnheim (Paperback)

About the Book

"This book is an attempt to proceed from earlier studies of art to a broader concern with visual perception as a cognitive activity-- a reversal, one might say, of the historical development that led in the philosophy of the eighteenth century from 'aisthesis' to aesthetics, from sensory experience in general to the arts in particular."--Preface.

Book Synopsis

For thirty-five years Visual Thinking has been the gold standard for art educators, psychologists, and general readers alike. In this seminal work, Arnheim, author of The Dynamics of Architectural Form, Film as Art, Toward a Psychology of Art, and Art and Visual Perception, asserts that all thinking (not just thinking related to art) is basically perceptual in nature, and that the ancient dichotomy between seeing and thinking, between perceiving and reasoning, is false and misleading. An indispensable tool for students and for those interested in the arts.

From the Back Cover

"Groundbreaking when first published in 1969, this book is now of even greater relevance to make the reader aware of the need to educate the visual sense, a matter so harmfully neglected in the present system."--Peter Selz, author of Nathan Oliveira

"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. Few books continue to speak to the generations after them; Visual Thinking is one of those rare exceptions."--Jonathan Fineberg, author of Art Since 1940

About the Author

Rudolf Arnheim (July 15, 1904 - June 9, 2007) was an author, art and film theorist, and perceptual psychologist, as well as Professor Emeritus of the Psychology of Art at Harvard University. His books include Film as Art (California, 1957), Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (California, 1974), The Dynamics of Architectural Form (California, 1977), and The Split and the Structure: Twenty-eight Essays (California, 1996).