The Split and the Structure: Twenty-Eight Essays

By Rudolf Arnheim

Book Overview

Rudolf Arnheim's great forte is his ability to illuminate the perceptual processes that go into the making and reception of artworks-painting, sculpture, architecture, and film. Over the years, his pioneering mode of "reading" art from a unique scientific/philosophic perspective has garnered him an established and devoted audience. That audience will take pleasure in Arnheim's most recent collection of essays, one that covers a range of topics and includes titles such as "Outer Space and Inner Space," "What Is an Aesthetic Fact?," "As I Saw Children's Art," "Two Ways of Being Human," "Consciousness-an Island of Images," and "From Chaos to Wholeness."

The notion of structure is Arnheim's guide in these explorations. Most of the essays examine the nature of structure affirmatively: how it comes about, its incentives and objectives, its celebration of perfection. He is interested in how artists grope for structure to shape powerful, enlightening images, and how a scientist's search for truth is a search for structure.

Writing with enviable clarity, even when deploying complex arguments, Arnheim makes it easy and exciting to follow him as he thinks. America is not abundantly supplied with "public intellectuals" such as Rudolf Arnheim-to have his writings with us is cause for celebration.

"The word 'structure' appears for good reason in the title of this collection. . . . Structure seems to be needed as an arbiter wherever this civilization of ours is split by selfish interests and fighting for either/or decisions. The essays want to speak with the voice of reason, because they want to show how the parts require the whole."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520204786
• ISBN13: 9780520204782
• Release Date: October 1996
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 125 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 6.4" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Bridging the gap between the arts and science

This is the first book I've read by Arnheim, but surely not the last. These 28 clearly written non-technical essays are a delight to read and contemplate. Arnheim's wide-ranging intellect covers a lot of ground, from painting, photography and literature to science and philosophy. But this is erudition with a light touch, and the author knows how to balance abstraction with concrete analysis, inviting us to use all our senses to experience the parts and the whole.