Art, Design and Gestalt Theory - Part II Like many of his contemporaries, Whistler was fascinated by Japanese art, especially Ukiyo-e woodblock prints, which were introduced to Europe and America after Japanese ports were opened to foreign trade in 1854. At the close of the nineteenth century, there was a frenzy of interest in things Japanese (a trend called "Japonisme"), which was fueled by a handful of popular books by British, American and Japanese authors, notably Ernest Fenollosa's The Masters of the Ukiyo-e (1896), Arthur Dow's Composition (1899), Denman W. Ross's A Theory of Pure Design (1906) and Kakuzo Okakura's The Book of Tea (1906). Published in more than 20 editions between 1899 and the early 1940s, Dow's book in particular had a far-reaching effect on the formal training of artists, designers and architects in the United States.
There is a persuasive resemblance between gestalt principles and the Japanese-inspired aesthetics that Dow and others propagated. For example, the gestalt emphasis on the dynamic interplay of parts and wholes had been anticipated as early as the third century B.C. in China by a passage in the Tao Te Ching that states that although a wheel is made of 30 spokes, it is the space between the spokes that determines the overall form of the wheel. The phenomenon of reversible figure-ground has precedents in the yin-yang symbol and, in Japanese art, in the compositional equivalence of light and dark, called notan. The gestaltists' ideas of structural economy and closure (the tendency to perceive incomplete forms as complete) are echoed in the Japanese emphasis on elimination of the insignificant and in the ideas of implicitness and the active complicity of the viewer, because genuine beauty, as Okakura explained, "could be discovered only by one who mentally completed the incomplete". Even the research of embedded figures by gestaltist Kurt Gottschaldt has an astonishing parallel in Dow's use of tartan compositional grids, which were adapted from Oriental lattice patterns and apparently applied by Frank Lloyd Wright and Piet Mondrian in architecture and painting, respectively.
While Japanese aesthetics contributed to the trend toward geometric abstraction in turn-of-the-century art and design, there is no evidence that the gestalt psychologists were directly or knowingly influenced by either Japanese art or aestheticism. "Our place at the Imperial Palace," recalled Rudolf Arnheim in a letter in 1995, "was as monastically inbred as most scientific breeding places, and although people like Köhler and Wertheimer were interested in art and music, less in literature, [the influences of Japonisme and the aesthetic movement] had no resonance there. For me, they all came later. Okakura's The Book of Tea is still one of my cherished possessions, and so is a booklet by Fenollosa on Chinese ideographs. . . . A book by Dow on composition is unknown to me even now".
Wertheimer and Koffka died in the early 1940s; Köhler in 1967. Today, gestalt theory's influence in the field of psychology is unobtrusive in the sense that its findings have all been absorbed by more recent viewpoints and because most of the prominent gestalt psychologists have either retired or died. The notable exception is Arnheim, now in his early 90s, who continues to write provocative essays on psychology and art and whose latest book on art, a collection of essays titled The Split and the Structure, was published in 1996.
In recent years, Arnheim has been outspoken in his criticism of some aspects of postmodern culture, as implied by the title of one of his books, To the Rescue of Art. There are impairments in current design, he believes, that cultivate "an unbridled extravagance, a vulgarity of taste, and a triviality of thought". In return, some postmodern critics, particularly Lupton and Miller, have attacked gestalt theory as interpreted by Arnheim, Kepes and Donis A. Dondis (author of A Primer of Visual Literacy), contending that it "isolates visual perception from linguistic interpretation [and thereby] encourages indifference to cultural meaning." To study abstract composition is not in itself objectionable, they argue, but "design's linguistic and social aspects are trivialized or ignored when abstraction is made the primary focus of design thinking".
Curiously, Lupton and Miller use comparable methods to disavow gestalt theory: They abstract, simplify and reinterpret it, isolating it from much of its historical, linguistic and social background and, thereby, ironically, largely ignore its "cultural interpretation." A final irony is that their own elegant books make exaggerated use of haute couture typography and page layouts, with purposely dissonant grouping effects, embedded tartan grids and structural economy - devices that Wertheimer sought to explain in 1910 when he founded gestalt psychology.
Roy R. Behrens |
