To the Rescue of Art: Twenty-Six Essays

by Rudolf Arnheim

Never before published essays by the widely admired psychologist of art. Arnheim spiritedly asserts art's fundamental achievements.

Rudolf Arnheim has spent a lifetime analyzing the basic psychological principles that make works of visual art meaningful, stirring, indispensable, and lasting. But recent fashionable attitudes and theories about art, he argues, are undermining the foundation of artistic achievement itself.

The essays collected in this volume are written in his familiar, careful, and solidly supported manner, but under present circumstances they amount to a call to arms. Included is a series of miniature monographs on a variety of great works of art. In other essays, Arnheim uncovers enlightening perspectives in the art of the blind, in architectural space, in caricature, and in the work of psychotics and autistic children. He also presents new scientific aspects on the psychology of art and widens our range of vision by connecting art with language, literature, and religion.

Genres: Art

Hardcover

First published November 19, 1991

About the author

Rudolf Arnheim (1904–2007) was a German-born author, art and film theorist, and perceptual psychologist. He learned Gestalt psychology from studying under Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler at the University of Berlin and applied it to art. His magnum opus was his book Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (1954). Other major books by Arnheim have included Visual Thinking (1969), and The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts (1982). Art and Visual Perception was revised, enlarged and published as a new version in 1974, and it has been translated into fourteen languages. He lived in Germany, Italy, England, and America. Most notably, Arnheim taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Harvard University, and the University of Michigan. He has greatly influenced art history and psychology in America.

Reviews

[Charlotte · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not intellectually up to much of this book, but I especially enjoyed his "walk" through the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in the essay "Seven Exercises in Art Appreciation" and his strong defense ("rescue") of the idea that art exists like religion [by which he doesn't mean mindless adherence to restrictive theologies] to reveal the "unfathomable greatness," and the artist has a requirement to "emulate the nobility of the work of art by one's own attitude toward the world", his example being Rilke's understanding that "you [he] must change his life," after enumerating the beauties of a particular work of art. (not to say the artist has to be conventionally "moral" or certainly NOT religious)

Also, the gift of perception requires that we use it. Open my eyes, open my ears, open my heart.

P.S. I forgot to say that my receipt for purchasing this book (from December 1993!) was still in it. I taped it inside the front cover with this note: "I bought this book when it was NEW. I'm reading it 30 years later! 1/1/22 (well, 29 yrs)" It has moved twice with me without being read. It's a reflection of my intention to read ALL the books in my house before I let more in (can't do anything about gifts, alas).

[Jacqueline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense, but what I love about old Rudy. And, whew, what a note taker this one is. I already have a list of referenced books to read. Jeez Louise.