To the Rescue of Art: Twenty-Six Essays

Never before published essays by the widely admired psychologist of art. Arnheim spiritedly asserts art's fundamental achievements.

Rudolf Arnheim has spent a lifetime analyzing the basic psychological principles that make works of visual art meaningful, stirring, indispensable, and lasting. But recent fashionable attitudes and theories about art, he argues, are undermining the foundation of artistic achievement itself.

The essays collected in this volume are written in his familiar, careful,...