This book examines how we perceive and understand abstract art in contrast to artworks that represent reality. Philosophical, psychological and neuroscience research, including the work of philosopher Paul Crowther, are considered and out of these approaches a complex model is developed to account for this experience. The understanding embodied in this model is rooted in facet theory, mapping sentences and partially ordered analyses, which together provide a comprehensive understanding of the perceptual experience of abstract art.

"How Art Works explores puzzles that have preoccupied philosophers as well as the general public: Can art be defined? How do we decide what is good art? Why do we gravitate to sadness in art? Why do we devalue a perfect fake? Could 'my kid have done that'? Does reading fiction enhance empathy? Drawing on careful observations, probing interviews, and clever experiments, Ellen Winner reveals surprising answers to these and other artistic mysteries. We may come away with a new understanding of how art works on us."--Jacket.

2014 Reprint of 1953 New York Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. In this text, Worringer identifies two opposing tendencies pervading the history of art from ancient times through the Enlightenment. He claims that in societies experiencing periods of anxiety and intense spirituality, such as those of ancient Egypt and the Middle Ages, artistic production tends toward a flat, crystalline "abstraction," while cultures that are oriented toward science and the physical world, like ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy, are dominated by more naturalistic, embodied styles, which he grouped under the term "empathy." As was traditional for art history at the time, Worringer's book remained firmly engaged with the past, ignoring contemporaneous artistic production. Yet in the wake of its publication-just one year after Pablo Picasso painted his masterpiece "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon"-"Abstraction and Empathy" came to be seen as fundamental for understanding the rise of Expressionism and the role of abstraction in the early twentieth century.

Four essayists explore the impact of synesthesia, or the involuntary joining of the senses, on the work of artists who are or who are suspected to have been synesthestic. They include David Hockney, Joan Mitchell, Tom Thomson, and Vincent van Gogh.

Presents brief history of abstract painting and its use in art studies in schools.

This book uncovers how we make meaning of abstraction, both historically and in present times, and examines abstract images as a visual language. The contributors demonstrate that abstraction is not primarily an artistic phenomenon, but rather arises from human beings’ desire to imagine, understand and communicate complex, ineffable concepts in fields ranging from fine art and philosophy to technologies of data visualization, from cartography and medicine to astronomy. The book will be of interest to scholars working in image studies, visual studies, art history, philosophy and aesthetics.

A philosopher makes the case for thinking of works of art as tools for investigating ourselves In his new book, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, the philosopher and cognitive scientist Alva Noë raises a number of profound questions: What is art? Why do we value art as we do? What does art reveal about our nature? Drawing on philosophy, art history, and cognitive science, and making provocative use of examples from all three of these fields, Noë offers new answers to such questions. He also shows why recent efforts to frame questions about art in terms of neuroscience and evolutionary biology alone have been and will continue to be unsuccessful.