Art, Design and Gestalt Theory - Part I

What may be gestalt psychology's most enduring influence on art and design came from a paper by Max Wertheimer titled "Theory of Form," published in 1923. Nicknamed "the dot essay" because it was illustrated with abstract patterns of dots and lines, Wertheimer concluded in it that certain gestalts are enhanced by our innate tendencies to constellate, or to see as "belonging together" elements that look alike (called "similarity grouping"), are close together ("proximity grouping") or have structural economy ("good continuation"). That such tendencies are inborn, not learned, is suggested by the cross-cultural effectiveness of sleight-of-hand magic and camouflage, both of which work by subverting the "laws" described in Wertheimer's paper. But the interplay of such grouping tendencies is far from simple, because: (1) as the effect of simultaneous contrast discussed earlier demonstrates, the appearance of parts is determined by wholes; (2) judgments about similarity or proximity are always comparative; and (3) in compositions as intricate as paintings, posters and page layouts, parts may be purposely made to connect by one grouping tendency (similarity of color, for example) but to disconnect by others (distance, for example, or differences of shape, size or direction).

It is likely that few artists were directly aware of Wertheimer's dot essay, one exception being Paul Klee, who (as Marianne Teuber has shown) used some of its diagrams in his paintings in the 1930s. Rather, they learned about his "laws of visual organization" from other writings, long after the essay was first published, and particularly from two books that had an enormous and lasting effect on art and design education: Language of Vision (1944) by György Kepes, a Hungarian-born graphic designer who taught with Moholy-Nagy at the New Bauhaus in Chicago; and Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (1954) by Rudolf Arnheim, a Berlin gestaltist who emigrated to the United States, became professor of the Psychology of Art at Harvard University and published 13 books on gestalt theory and art.

Surely, one of the reasons artists embraced gestalt theory is that it provided, in their minds, scientific validation of age-old principles of composition and page layout. A French byname for gestalt theory is la psychologie de la forme. Inadvertently, due to its emphasis on flat abstract patterns, structural economy and implicitness, gestalt theory became associated with the modernist tendency toward "aestheticism," the belief that-like music and architecture-all art is essentially abstract design and, as Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller characterize it in Design Writing Research (1996), that "design is, at bottom, an abstract, formal activity" in which the "text [or subject matter] is secondary, added only after the mastery of form".