Abstract

In this article three cases are studied in which pictorial similarities occur between early abstract paintings and illustrations of experimental psychologists in the beginning of this century: (1) Klee’s lessons at the Bauhaus versus Wertheimer’s Gestalt psychological experiments, (2) the experimentation of the Dutch artist group De Stijl versus Rubin’s psychological experiments with figure-ground phenomena and (3) the visual analyses of the artist Kandinsky versus those of the psychologist Lipps. The author argues that these pictorial similarities emerged from the fact that experimentation with Gestalt phenomena, on the one hand, and formal analyses of art, on the other, have a common historical tradition that started in the late-nineteenth-century Kunstwissenschaft (science of art).

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