Journal of Art Historiography (Jan 2015)
The Warburg/Arnheim effect: Linking cultural/social and perceptual psychology of art
Abstract
Aby Warburg and Rudolf Arnheim represent two, mutually complementary, ways of productive interfacing between art history/culture history on the one hand and psychology on the other. It is suggested that neither Warburg´s nor Arnheim´s ideas could have come to form a sustainable theory without taking into account the perspective and focus that preoccupied the other. The article points to possible ways of bridging the gap between the kind of visual cultural and social psychology pursued by Warburg and the perceptual psychology that concerned Arnheim. It is argued that, far from being a matter of just historiographic interest, the attempt to make such connections touches on some key issues and concepts of art theory and its relationship to sciences of the mind and brain today. A conceptual framework is presented in which the approaches of Warburg and Arnheim can be meaningfully integrated. Both thinkers were much preoccupied by the problem of expression. The final section establishes some connections between their respective theories of expression and shows how these theories can be productively extended to address current research on the affective and the empathic response to visual art.
