Art, Design and Gestalt Theory - Part I

Aestheticism had been anticipated in 1851 by John Ruskin in a passage in Stones of Venice, the book that spawned the arts and crafts movement, in which he stated that "the arrangement of colors and lines is an art analogous to the composition of music, and entirely independent of the representation of facts". More than 2 decades later, this view was reaffirmed by James A.M. Whistler, a leading figure in the aesthetic movement, for which the unfortunate slogan became "art for art's sake." "As music is the poetry of sound," Whistler wrote in 1878 (in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies), "so is painting the poetry of sight, and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of color". To underscore the analogy between art and music, and to promote the idea of art as design, he included in the titles to his paintings musical terms such as "arrangements," "nocturnes" and "harmonies."

Roy R. Behrens