Visual Thinking by Rudolf Arnheim (review)

Books 269 particular, its influence on music composition. As regards the visual fine arts, he mentions the interesting experiments of Bela Julesh, the first to make computer graphics and who proved that it is not mathematical order that is important in a work of art but patterns perceived by a viewer. The author therefore, concludes that the hypothetical aesthetic measure proposed by George D. Birkhoff is of doubtful worth. I find it regrettable that he has ignored the beginnings of the formulation of a new hypothesis of aesthetics based upon the perception of visual phenomena-a beginning stimulated by some cybernetic considerations put forward by Abraham Moles. Visual Thinking. Rudolf Arnheim. Faber and Faber, London, 1970. 345 pp. illus. £5.50. Reviewed by: Ken Adams* The author is probably best known for Art and Visual Perception, Picasso's 'Guernica' and his books about film and radio. He has displayed an unusual determination to find good ways of describing in words what he identifies as the range ofpossible visual experiences. In his specific studies ofart, he has attempted to find words for the special perceptual processes that a work of art promotes in the spectator. The act of verbalising what is visual seems to be the groundwork on which his more theoretical studies (which also draw freely from Gestalt Psychology) have been raised. 'It (verbal language) is not a foreign medium, unsuitable for visual things. It fails us when and because visual analysis breaks down' (Introduction to Art and Visual Perception (p. vi). Readers of that earlier book will remember his exhaustive listing of figure ground reversals in a woodcut by Jean Arp and his sympathetic exposition of the young child's antinaturalistic conventions for representing space. Arnheim's recent article entitled Inverted Perspective in Art (Leonardo 5, 125 (1972)) is a good example of his work. The book under review is packed with opinions and examples, many of them old and many of them new. I think, however, that readers who are new to Arnheim will find Visual Thinking less easy to understand than the Art and Visual Perception of 1957. He is more inclined to take short cuts in the exposition. Readers who are familiar with the earlier book will, like myself, be disappointed if they have been hoping for a distillation of the essence of Arnheim's 'wisdom'. The new book is no more concise and although it aims at a 'higher' level of theoretical truth, the standard ofargument seems to me generally weaker. Arnheim's intention in writing this book was partly polemical. He wished to convert the adherents of what he regarded as a powerful and harmful tradition to a saner view. At the same time, he wished to make a fundamental enquiry into the nature of visual thought. Ifone could emerge from * 19 Dartmouth Park Road, London N.W.5, England. such an enquiry, with clear-cut communicable results, the polemic might be justified. I think, however, that Arnheim oversimplifies in order to persuade and so fails to realize either ofhis intentions adequately. He regards the tradition that he attacks as ancient. He examines some of its Greek sources and he identifiesits modernform with the following remark: 'Ironically enough, Alexander Baumgarten, who gave the new discipline of aesthetics its name by asserting that perception, just as reasoning, could attain a state of perfection, continued nevertheless the tradition ofdescribing perception as the inferior of the two cognition powers because it supposedly lacked the distinctness that comes only from the superior faculty of reasoning' (p. 2). In his preface, Arnheim says 'Perhaps the real problem was ... a split between sense and thought, which caused various deficiency diseases in modern man' (p. v). 'Our educational system, including our intelligence tests, is known to discriminate not only against the underprivileged and the handicapped but equally against the most gifted. Among those capable of becoming most productive in the arts and sciences are many who will have particular trouble with the formalistic thought operations on which so much of our schooling is based, and will struggle against them most strenuously' (p. 207). The system, he implies, favours 'the clever jugglers'. 'And yet it is the relentless attachment to the world...