This volume contains the edited proceedings of the first interdisciplinary symposium on pictorial processing, entitled 'What is a painting?', held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in April 1978, which brought together artists, psychologists and philosophers to exchange ideas about pictorial representation. The contributors examine the roles of perception and cognition in pictorial processing and present their ideas on theoretical issues raised by constructivists, gestaltists and perspectivists. They also discuss contrasting notions about perspective, phantom contours, attached and cast shadows, motion, the nature of abstraction, and space in pictures. The final section of the book treats applied aspects of picture processing, art appreciation and the development of the creative process.
In this text, philosophers, psychologists and art historians explore the implications of theories of vision for our understanding of the nature of pictorial representation and picture perception.
Perception and Artistic Style explores the role of visual processes in the creation and perception of painting and drawing. By looking at the relationship between perception and representation evidence is provided that purely visual processes are a richer source of artistic inspiration than is commonly realised. Many of the obvious variations in artistic style are firmly rooted in visual perception and visual cognition. This book looks at a range of fundamental visual processes and investigates their contribution to major stylistic features of works of art. A wide selection of pictures is considered; ancient, medieval, renaissance, nineteenth and twentieth century and primitive, and both well known and relatively obscure works are examined.The volume includes 86 figures, 13 grey-scale illustrations of artworks and 43 line drawings. This book will be of value to students of perception, students of art and art history, and, since the more technical aspects have been confined to the notes, the general reader who wishes to increase his/her appreciation and understanding of pictorial art.
A groundbreaking account of perception and art, from one of the twentieth century’s most important art historians E. H. Gombrich is widely considered to be one of the most influential art historians of the twentieth century, and Art and Illusion is generally agreed to be his most important book. Bridging science and the humanities, this classic work examines the history and psychology of pictorial representation in light of modern theories of information and learning in visual perception. Searching for a rational explanation of the changing styles of art, Gombrich reexamines ideas about the imitation of nature and the function of tradition. In testing his arguments, he ranges over the history of art, from the ancient Greeks, Leonardo, and Rembrandt to the impressionists and the cubists. But the triumphant originality of Art and Illusion is that Gombrich is less concerned with the artists than with the psychological experience of the viewers of their work. Please note: All images in this ebook are presented in black and white and have been reduced in size.
Author List. Introduction. Section I: Selected Papers of Julian Hochberg. 1. Hochberg, C.B. & Hochberg, J. (1952). Familiar size and the perception of depth. Journal of Psychology, 34, 107-114. 2. Hochberg, J. & McAlister, E. (1953). A quantitative approach to figural goodness. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 46, 361-364. 3. Hochberg, J. & Beck, J. (1954). Apparent spatial arrangement and perceived brightness. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 47, 263-266. 4. Hochberg, J. (1956). Perception: Toward the recovery of a definition. Psychological Review, 63, 400-405. 5. Hochberg, J. (1962).
Durer's Devices: Beyond the Projective Model of Pictures is a collection of papers that discusses the nature of picture making and perception. One paper presents a perceptual theory of pictorial representation in which cultural and historical options in styles of depiction that appear to be different are actually closely related perceptually. Another paper discusses pictorial functions and perceptual structures including pictorial representation, perceptual theory, flat canvass, and the deep world. One paper suggests that perception can be more a matter of information "make up" than "pick up." Light becomes somewhat informative and the eye, correspondingly, becomes less or more presumptive. Another paper notes that human vision is transformed by our modes of representation, that image formation can be essentially incomplete, false, or misleading (primarily as regards dramatic performance and pictorial representation). One paper makes three claims that: (1) the blind have untapped depiction abilities; (2) haptics, involving the sense of touch, have an intuitive sense of perspective; and (3) depiction is perceptual based on graphic elements and pictorial configurations. The collection is suitable for psychologists, physiologists, psychophysicists, and researchers in human perception or phenomenology.
In Art and Representation, John Willats presents a radically new theory of pictures. To do this, he has developed a precise vocabulary for describing the representational systems in pictures: the ways in which artists, engineers, photographers, mapmakers, and children represent objects. His approach is derived from recent research in visual perception and artificial intelligence, and Willats begins by clarifying the key distinction between the marks in a picture and the features of the scene that these marks represent. The methods he uses are thus closer to those of a modern structural linguist or psycholinguist than to those of an art historian. Using over 150 illustrations, Willats analyzes the representational systems in pictures by artists from a wide variety of periods and cultures. He then relates these systems to the mental processes of picture production, and, displaying an impressive grasp of more than one scholarly discipline, shows how the Greek vase painters, Chinese painters, Giotto, icon painters, Picasso, Paul Klee, and David Hockney have put these systems to work. But this book is not only about what systems artists use but also about why artists from different periods and cultures have used such different systems, and why drawings by young children look so different from those by adults. Willats argues that the representational systems can serve many different functions beyond that of merely providing a convincing illusion. These include the use of anomalous pictorial devices such as inverted perspective, which may be used for expressive reasons or to distance the viewer from the depicted scene by drawing attention to the picture as a painted surface. Willats concludes that art historical changes, and the developmental changes in children's drawings, are not merely arbitrary, nor are they driven by evolutionary forces. Rather, they are determined by the different functions that the representational systems in pictures can serve. Like readers of Ernst Gombrich's famous Art and Illusion (still available from Princeton University Press), on which Art and Representation makes important theoretical advances, or Rudolf Arnheim's Art and Visual Perception, Willats's readers will find that they will never again return to their old ways of looking at pictures.
Pictorial representation is one of the core questions in aesthetics and philosophy of art. What is a picture? How do pictures represent things? This collection of specially commissioned chapters examines the influential thesis that the core of pictorial representation is not resemblance but 'seeing-in', in particular as found in the work of Richard Wollheim. We can see a passing cloud as a rabbit, but we also see a rabbit in the clouds. 'Seeing-in' is an imaginative act of the kind employed by Leonardo’s pupils when he told them to see what they could - for example, battle scenes - in a wall of cracked plaster. This collection examines the idea of 'seeing-in' as it appears primarily in the work of Wollheim but also its origins in the work of Wittgenstein. An international roster of contributors examine topics such as the contrast between seeing-in and seeing-as; whether or in what sense Wollheim can be thought of as borrowing from Wittgenstein; the idea that all perception is conceptual or propositional; the metaphor of figure and ground and its relation to the notion of 'two-foldedness'; the importance in art of emotion and the imagination. Wollheim, Wittgenstein and Pictorial Representation: Seeing-as and Seeing-in is essential reading for students and scholars of aesthetics and philosophy of art, and also of interest to those in related subjects such as philosophy of mind and art theory.
