Visual Thinking [Paperback]

For thirty-five yearsVisual Thinkinghas been the gold standard for art educators, psychologists, and general readers alike. In this seminal work, Arnheim, author ofThe Dynamics of Architectural Form, Film as Art, Toward a Psychology of Art,andArt 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 indis-pensable tool for students and for those interested in the arts.

Rudolf Arnheimis Professor Emeritus of the Psychology of Art at Harvard University. His books includeFilm as Art(California, 1957),Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye(California, 1974),The Dynamics of Architectural Form(California, 1977), andThe Split and the Structure: Twenty-eight Essays(California, 1996).

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 ofNathan 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 Thinkingis one of those rare exceptions. Jonathan Fineberg,author ofArt Since 1940