Art and Phenomenology is one of the first books to explore visual art as a mode of experiencing the world itself, showing how in the words of Merleau-Ponty ‘Painting does not imitate the world, but is a world of its own’. Essential reading for anyone interested in phenomenology, aesthetics, and visual culture.

The first sustained phenomenological approach to modern art, taking a new approach and drawing upon an unsual selection of thinkers.

The book is a comprehensive phenomenological study of meanings that are unique to the major visual art forms.

Two German philosophers working during the Weimar Republic in Germany, between the two World Wars, produced seminal texts that continue to resonate almost a hundred years later. Franz Rosenzweig-a Jewish philosopher, and Martin Heidegger-a philosopher who at one time was studying to become a Catholic priest, each in their own, particular way include in their writings powerful philosophies of art that, if approached phenomenologically and ethically, provide keys to understanding their radically divergent trajectories, both biographically and for their philosophical heritage. Simon provides a close reading of some of their essential texts-The Star of Redemption for Rosenzweig and Being and Time and The Origin of the Work of Art for Heidegger-in order to draw attention to how their philosophies of art can be understood to provide significant ethical directives.

The author presents a varied menu of ideas and experiences in many areas - in research, in diagnosis, and in psychotherapy, each using art media with patients of all ages. She integrates art, phenomenology and gestalt psychology, describing specific techniques and findings. Part I of the book lays out the theoretical foundations and the techniques; Part II addresses the formal components used in art therapy - line, shape and colour in their interrelated dynamics and discusses other aspects and modes of symbolic expression found in clients' work. Part III looks at symbolic expression through the scribble, offering a system of classification, diagnostic possibilities and case studies of work with eating disorders. Part IV focuses on art expression for art therapy diagnostics, including a method for qualitative diagnostics, and a first full diagnostic battery for adolescents. Part V is devoted to Holocaust children's art expressions, highlighting the power of art expression in children under ultimate stress, the intensity of their inner experience, and its visualization in the structure of the pictures. The book is for art therapists and advanced students. It can be used as a textbook on phenomenological art therapy; for therapeutically-oriented art teachers, educators and social workers; and for practicing psychotherapists, to see that art is a source of expression demonstrating how a person is.

Drawings and paintings are made, and the process of making creates unique meanings that transform our perception of space-time and our sense of finitude. By using a phenomenological approach, the understanding of art practice and its relation to particular historical and cultural contexts can be significantly enhanced.

Fascination with quotidian experience in modern art, literature, and philosophy promotes ecstatic forms of reflection on the very structure of the everyday world. Gosetti-Ferencei examines the ways in which modern art and literature enable a study of how we experience quotidian life. She shows that modernism, while exhibiting many strands of development, can be understood by investigating how its attentions to perception and expectation, to the common quality of things, or to childhood play gives way to experiences of ecstasis&—the stepping outside of the ordinary familiarity of the world. While phenomenology grounds this study (through Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Bachelard), what makes this book more than a treatise on phenomenological aesthetics is the way in which modernity itself is examined in its relation to the quotidian. Through the works of artists and writers such as Benjamin, C&ézanne, Frost, Klee, Newman, Pollock, Ponge, Proust, Rilke, Robbe-Grillet, Rothko, Sartre, and Twombly, the world of quotidian life can be seen to harbor a latent ecstasis. The breakdown of the quotidian through and after modernism then becomes an urgent question for understanding art and literature in its capacity to further human experience, and it points to the limits of phenomenological explications of the everyday.