Published online 18 May 2003

Abstraction in art with implications for perception

Robert ZimmerGoldsmiths Digital Studios, Goldsmiths College, University of London, Lewisham Way, New Cross,

London SE14 6NW, UK (r.zimmer@gold.ac.uk)

The relationship between people and art is complex and intriguing. Of course, artworks are our creations;but in interesting and important ways, we are also created by our artworks. Our sense of the world isinformed by the art we make and by the art we inherit and value, works that, in themselves, encodeothers’ world views. This two-way effect is deeply rooted and art encodes and affects both a culture’sways of perceiving the world and its ways of remaking the world it perceives. The purpose of this paperis to indicate ways in which a study of abstraction in art can be used to discover insights into, to quotethe call for papers for this issue, ‘our perception of the world, acquired through experience’ and ‘the wayconcepts are formed and manipulated to achieve goals’.

Keywords: art; abstraction; perception; abstract art; painting

1. INTRODUCTION

A story is told about a meeting between Picasso and anAmerican soldier stationed in France during the SecondWorld War. The soldier took Picasso to task for not pro-ducing realistic pictures and, to illustrate the ideal fromwhich Picasso has fallen so far short, he pulled out aphotograph of his fiancee back home saying: ‘This is whata picture should look like’. Picasso looked carefully at thephotograph and said: ‘Your girlfriend is rather small, isn’tshe?’ (recounted in Solso 1996).

This story reminds us that all artworks, all pictorial rep-resentations, are abstractions. Picasso makes the pointabout size, but similar points can be made about the soldi-er’s fiancee’s stillness, lack of a third dimension, and soon. However, as we will see, these abstractions do notdetract from a picture’s ability to represent reality, but areinextricable from the power of these representations. Thispoint is made explicitly in a parable by Jorge Luis Borges,in which a group of cartographers make increasinglylarger, more accurate maps of their mythical country untilthey finally arrive at a full-size completely detailed map(Borges 2000). This final map, this entirely non-abstracted map, is completely useless to all but lovers ofthe art of cartography, and, at the end of the tale, thissuper-map is left tattered and rotting in the desert. It isdifficult to decode the irony in the parable’s title: ‘OnExactitude and Science’. The story may be a critique ofscience as a way of describing the world or it could beread as saying that exact sciences must be built on inexactrepresentations. In either case, there is a sure insistenceon the need to abstract away from exactitude if we are toarrive at meaningful representations.

This paper considers abstractions and the meaning-fulness of representations. In particular, it concerns dis-

One contribution of 16 to a Theme Issue ‘The abstraction paths: fromexperience to concept’.

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B (2003) 358, 1285–1291 1285 2003 The Royal SocietyDOI 10.1098/rstb.2003.1307

cussions of abstraction and representation in art, and theimplications of these discussions to the sciences of mindsand brains. Several psychological accounts are enumer-ated and discussed uncritically. It is not the purpose ofthe paper to evaluate these accounts, but only to suggestways that the accounts could be used as part of an explo-ration of how abstraction is applied in forming our percep-tion of the world and in manipulating concepts to achievegoals. The only ambitions for this paper are: (i) that thereader will come away with a sense that studying abstrac-tion in art can shed light on the issues of perception andconcept manipulation; and (ii) that he or she will gathersome clues as to where to begin that study. The first sec-tion gives a brief history of abstraction in art; this is fol-lowed by a section concerning relations between that arthistory and issues about minds and brains.

2. WHAT IS ABSTRACTION IN ART?

The word ‘abstract’ comes from the Latin abstrahere,which means to draw away. The connotations of the wordand its cognates can be either negative—as in the use of‘abstracted’ for ‘absent-minded’—or positive—as in the‘abstract universal truths’ that are the theorems ofgeometry. The question of value is a matter of what hasbeen left behind, and what we are left with after the draw-ing away: the abstracted man has left the world behind;the abstract truth has left behind all vagaries and contin-gencies. The tradition of abstraction in art is a series ofattempts towards something approaching the secondexample.

Since at least the eighteenth century, the contentionthat an artist has used abstraction in creating a work ofart means that he or she has uncovered the essence of athing (Morgan 1994). The artist is thought to arrive atthis essence by throwing away everything that is peculiarto a particular instance of an object or a particularmoment of time, leaving only the essential, universalproperties of the object or scene. The history of art is filled

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Figure 1. Theo Van Doesburg, An object aesthetically transfigured. (First published in Van Doesburg 1925.)

with restatements of this point. For example, Matissewrote: ‘Underlying this … superficial existence of things… one can search for a truer, more essential character,which the artist will seize so that he may give to reality amore lasting interpretation’ (Matisse 1978).

The status of this essential thing that the artist wishesto seize is much debated, and the question had a certainurgency in the nineteenth century. To Schopenhauer, forexample, the essence is the Platonic Ideal, an ideal figu-ration that predates all specific instances (Schopenhauer1958). To Hegel, the ‘essence’ or ‘universal idea’ is some-thing man-made; he writes of the process of abstractionas allowing painters to recreate ‘the existent and fleetingappearance of nature as something generated afresh byman’ (Hegel 1975). The Hegelian view currently holdssway, and fits better with the project that underlies thispaper.

As is made clear in the Hegel quotation, abstraction didnot at first entail a move away from the figurative. How-ever, once the process of abstraction is to the fore, the goalof capturing the essence of an object becomes somethingdifferent from painting the most accurate, most detailed,likeness. This in turn opens up the possibility of asequence of moves progressively away from direct figurat-ive art. The history of much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European painting can be mapped out in this way:as bridges, cathedrals and trees become patches of colourin Impressionism, these patches become objects in theirown rights in Pointillism and beyond that to pure geo-metric abstraction.

Something akin to this history can be glimpsed in a ser-ies of studies made by Theo van Doesburg, an earlyabstractionist painter and organizer of the abstractionistmagazine De Stijl, in 1919.

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In figure 1, the sequence from the upper left picture tothe lower right one is a clear development from a naturalistpicture of a cow to a geometric composition. The assump-tion behind this sequence is that what is essential to theoriginal picture not only remains as we move throughthese stages, but is in fact enhanced, or concentrated bythe removal of what is inessential. The implication is thatthis essence is most powerfully expressed through the lan-guage of geometry.

At some point, this language of geometry takes on itsown concreteness. Van Doesburg came to view ‘ConcreteArt’ as a more fitting description of his style of paintingthan ‘Abstract Art’. Similarly, Mondrian wrote: ‘Abstractart is concrete and, by its determined means of expression,even more concrete than naturalistic art’ (Mondrian 1945,p. 19). Max Bill put it even more strongly: ‘Concrete artis the opposite of abstract… Concrete is the ‘represen-tation’ of something that was previously not visible, notpalpable…The purpose of concretion is to translateabstract ideas into reality so that they can be perceived…’(quoted in Madrazo 1998).

This is a fascinating turnaround. The claim is that non-figurative paintings are not more abstract versions of a realworld but more concrete versions of mental constructs.The relation between the abstract ideas and the palpableworld is quite left behind here. That relationship, how-ever, is central to this paper, and studying these abstractor concrete paintings will bring insights into what Bill hasforgotten: that is the relationship between abstract ideasand the world from which they have sprung.

3. PSYCHOLOGY AS ART

Having surveyed the role of abstraction in art, this sec-tion turns to studies of the relations between art and

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minds and brains. The section is still focused on abstrac-tion, with the intention of deploying psychologicalaccounts of abstraction in art to help answer questionsconcerning our perception of the world. The study of therelationship between art and perceptual psychology has anactive and distinguished history and is presently enjoyinga vogue. There is not the space to survey the whole subjecthere but, as much of the major thinking on the subjectwill be redeployed in this paper, it is hoped that the paperwill give the reader some sense of the field.

(a) SchemataWe begin with a discussion of the work of Sir Ernst

Gombrich, who has written extensively on the linksbetween perception and art. The main plan of his pro-gramme is to apply principles of perception to gain anunderstanding of the production and reception of art-works. Within Gombrich’s work lies an undercurrent that,in parallel to the goals of this paper, moves in the oppositedirection, suggesting that the main findings will force areconsideration of the psychology of perception. This issometimes said explicitly and sometimes less so, as inthe following:

[T]he true miracle of the language of art is not that itenables the artist to create the illusion of reality. It is thatunder the hands of a great master the image becomestranslucent. In teaching us to see the visible worldafresh…’.

(Gombrich 1960)

The artwork trains the viewer—it teaches him or her tosee the ‘world afresh’—and, as Gombrich makes plainthroughout his work, the painter has been trained by look-ing at other paintings. Half of Art and illusion is an explo-ration of the ways that artists’ perceptions of the worldare informed by interpretations that are founded on theschemata (strategies of interpreting and recreating theworld) that they have learned from other art and modified.As Gombrich writes, ‘…the simple demand “paint what[you] see” is self-contradictory’. What the painter sees isalways dependent on his learned schemata. Gombrichtraces this right through the history of art: ‘primitive art-ist[s built up], say, a face out of simple forms rather thancopy a real face,’ ‘Egyptians [represented] in a picture allthey knew rather than all they saw’, going on through theRenaissance and on to Impressionism. This insistence thatthe artist needs to interpret nature is matched by Gom-brich’s stress on the viewer’s need to work at an interpret-ation of the artwork: ‘the beholder’s share in the readingsof images, his capacity, that is, to collaborate with the art-ist and to transform a piece of coloured canvas into a like-ness of the visible world.’

Both kinds of interpretive work are quite active. Gom-brich follows Karl Popper in critiquing a view of mind inwhich sense impressions are passively received, only laterto be worked upon. Theories must be, subconsciously,hypothesized before anything can be perceived; what isperceived is either a corroboration or a refutation of thetheory. Perception is a process of matching a simple visualscheme with the sensory images: ‘Without some initial sys-tem, without a first guess to which we can stick unless itis disproved, we could indeed make no “sense” of the mil-liards of ambiguous stimuli that reach us from our

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environment.’ (Gombrich 1960). In the case of painting,this means that there cannot be such a thing as a directcopy of nature. To depict nature faithfully, a painter firstneeds to have the schema in his mind. Thus, the artist‘begins not with his visual impression but with his ideaor concept’, meaning that ‘every artist has to know andconstruct a schema before he can adjust it to the needs ofportrayal’. The mental abstractions that lead to the cre-ation of abstract paintings, are not just immanent in thethings being abstracted but are somehow derived as afunction of both the thing and the worldview of thebeholder.

The theme of analysing the effort needed to decode anartwork is common throughout much of the work on artand minds. For example, Max Bill writes: ‘Art is unthink-able without the effort of the individual. Order on theother hand is impossible without an objectifying structure.This means that art can originate only when and becauseindividual expression and personal invention subsumethemselves under the principle of order of the structureand derive from it a new lawfulness and new formal possi-bilities’ (Bill 1965, p. 151). Bill’s insistence on structuringas a fundamental part of perceiving the artwork is a key-stone of Gestalt Psychological accounts of art, whichobtain their most direct exposition in Kepes (1947). Inthe introduction of that book, Kepes writes: ‘The experi-ence of an image is …a creative act of integration. Itsessential characteristic is that by plastic power an experi-ence is formed into an organic whole. Here is a basic disci-pline of forming, that is, thinking in terms of structure, adiscipline of utmost importance in the chaos of our form-less world’. The perception of an artwork is an active pro-cess of abstracting an ordered structure from the formless.

(b) Gestalt psychology and artThe writings of Bill and Kepes show that applying

gestalt principles to abstract art is a way of discoveringthings about abstraction in perception. R. Arnheim,through a long and active career, has trodden this pathwell; for example, see Arnheim (1954, 1969). The workthat, perhaps, follows this path most faithfully is Perceptualabstraction and art (Arnheim 1947).

In that article, Arnheim looks first at the drawings ofyoung children. What he finds is that a portrait drawn bya small child tends to be less a likeness of a particularperson, than a generic head. The child has more easilycome to terms with what we may term the more generalqualities of heads, such as roundness, than with the detailsof a particular head. One possible explanation put forwardfor this is that children may draw more from memory thanfrom perception. Arnheim dismisses this explanation byappeal to what is known about children’s minds, namelythat children rely more than adults on direct perceptualexperience. The argument that Arnheim favours is thatperceptual abstraction is, in fact, a basic operation. Thechild, and this does not just apply to children, perceivesthe abstraction more readily than the particular.

If this is so, it seems to sit uneasily with the history ofabstraction in art given above. In that account, it wouldappear that abstracting is quite a sophisticated operationthat appears at a later stage of cultural development thannaturalistic perception. However, the history looks verydifferent if we take a longer view, including early and

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non-European art. Much of the art that is looked on as‘primitive’, and thought of as poor attempts at naturalisticrepresentations, is more correctly looked upon as abstractrepresentations in themselves. Artworks produced by earlycultures, as well as those produced by children, showmuch higher degrees of abstractness than the work ofthe European Renaissance. It is worth noting that manytwentieth-century painters were inspired both by chil-dren’s drawings and by tribal art. Picasso, for example,admired children’s art and kept a collection of Africanmasks, the influence of which is apparent in many of hispaintings and sculptures. Abstraction, then, is a quite fun-damental perceptual operation. This leads to a gestalt-inspired theory of perception in which the abstract is per-ceived first and the particular derived later. That Arnheimsees this as applicable to human perception in general isclear: ‘In the field of art—and this is probably true alsofor the psychology of thinking—highly abstract formsappear at the most primitive stages’.1,2

The parallel implicit in Arnheim between the develop-ment of child art and the evolution of art through his-tory—this artistic ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny law—iscontroversial. The weight of argument is against it in itsstrongest form: many of the child’s developmental changesappear to relate more to the child’s intentions than to limi-tations in his or her cognitive structures, and a society’spredominant artistic modes are complicated cultural con-structs. However, as J. Gavin Bremner points out: ‘Thereare strong arguments to support the hypothesis that cul-tural evolution is closely tied to cognitive evolution of theindividuals within it. Assuming that this is true, there maystill be an important sense in which the evolution of artoccurs on a developmental sequence, not because itreflects directly the developing cognitions of the artist, butbecause it reflects an adaptation to the developingdemands of cultures that are evolving new ways of think-ing about the world’ (Bremner 1996, p. 151).

Even without the assumption of comparability betweenthe development of a culture and the development of achild, there is a strong argument here that attention paidto certain artworks—the work of children and tribal cul-tures—can change radically the view of what abstractionis. Here, the account changes the view of abstraction as ahighly developed skill to a view of abstraction as a primalpart of perception.

(c) The principles underlying artWhere Arnheim applies principles gleaned from Gestalt

psychology to understand the making and the beholdingof artworks, Vilayanur Ramachadran, an eminent neurol-ogist, has turned the process around and has been lookingto the history of art to help inform a theory of mind. Thehope is that this theory will, in turn, lead to a well-foundedtheory of aesthetics. Ramachandran and William Hirsteinset out eight principles as the laws that subconsciouslyunderlie the production and perception of all art(Ramachandran & Hirstein 1999). The authors see theirrules as playing a role analogous to that played by thelinguistic rules uncovered by Chomsky and his followers.The article has generated a good deal of commentary, andtwo issues of the Journal of Consciousness Studies are half-filled with other people’s discussions of Ramachandranand Hirstein’s ideas (Ramachandran & Hirstein 1999;

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Ramachandran 2000). At least four of Ramachandran andHirstein’s principles seem pertinent for our discussion:

(i) the beholder’s ability to group parts of a picture,viewing them as a whole;

(ii) the ‘peak shift’ principle;(iii) the beholder’s tendency to isolate a single cue when

looking at a painting;(iv) the pleasure people find in solving problems.

The first of these is related to the Gestalt work alreadydiscussed; the second principle is the one that is perhapsmost interesting: it is certainly the one that is treated mostextensively in the paper and the one that has generatedthe most controversy. To understand this principle, con-sider the following experiment: a rat is put in an environ-ment consisting of full food bins labelled by 3 in × 5 in(1 inch = 2.54 cm) rectangles and empty bins labelled bysquares. Not surprisingly, the rat will easily learn to seekout the rectangles. What is surprising, though, is that givena choice between a 3 in × 5 in rectangle and a rectanglethat is a bit longer—and therefore a bit further from beinga square—the rat will prefer the longer rectangle to theone on which it has been trained (Hansen 1959). Ramach-andran and Hirstein see this as a principle that worksthroughout art creation and reception: we are drawn toexaggerations. Consider one of their examples: the sculp-ture shown in figure 2.

The sculpture is made attractive by exaggerating thefeatures—both in terms of the figure and of the pose—thatdifferentiate women from men. In essence, the sculpture isa caricature of a woman. One of the principal argumentsof the Ramachandran and Hirstein paper is that all art hasan aspect of caricature about it, to take advantage of apeak-shift effect with people.3 If conceptual abstractionsmatch artistic ones, this theory suggests that conceptualabstractions contain exaggerations of the most importantfeatures of what is being abstracted.

The question for art, at least, is: how can you decidewhat features should be exaggerated? The answer is: findthe things that sum up the essence of your subject. Andthese are, as it is in all caricature, the things that are furth-est from some sense of normality, some anchor point. Instandard facial caricatures, this anchor point is taken tobe an average face. In the example in figure 2, the anchorpoint is an average body. This may limit the applicabilityof the theory. As Christopher Tyler notes in a review ofthe article: ‘For each kind of enhancement, this expla-nation requires that one identify both the form of theanchor point and the appropriate direction away from it,which may not be so easy for landscapes or scenes of parti-cular human activities’ (Tyler 1999, p.163).

Whatever the limitation, Ramachandran, as he spellsout in his reply to Gombrich’s criticism of the paper withHirstein, sees this principle as an explanation of allabstraction, including non-figuration, in art(Ramachandran 2000). The argument begins with anobservation that Niko Tinbergen made of seagull families(Tinbergen 1954). Tinbergen noticed that young seagullchicks learn to peck at a red spot on their mothers’ beaksto beg for food. Having learned this, the chicks will thenpeck with equal vigour at a red dot painted on a plank.Surprisingly, it turns out that the chicks will actually peck

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Figure 2. A Chola period (ca. eleventh century) statue of theGoddess Parvathi. (The statue is in the Ramachandrancollection; the picture is reproduced from the Journal ofConsciousness Studies 6, 1999, with permission from ImprintAcademic.)

more vigorously at a stick with three red stripes than theywill at the stick with the red spot. Ramachandran arguesthat three red stripes is a caricature of a red spot to seagullchicks. This example shows that a caricature need not beeasy to detect consciously. The inference that for seagullchicks the red stripes are a caricature of a red spot is basedon an assumption that the chicks have no reason to behungrily pecking at anything other than their mothers’beaks. The situation with people is considerably morecomplex. Purely abstract, geometrical pictures could wellbe caricatures for anything we find attractive in the realworld. This offers possibilities for exploring the connec-tions between the human visual and limbic systems by, inpart, exploring abstract art. This exploration mightinvolve, for example, checking for similar brain reactionsto some real world referents and some pure abstractions.

(d) Isolating cuesThe third of Ramachandran and Hirstein’s principles

listed above is that isolating a single modality can intensifythe interest of a work. Ramachandran and Hirstein takepreferences for outline drawings over detailed pictures asevidence for this principle. There is, for example, con-siderable pleasure in simple Matisse paintings and col-lages. Looking at such simple abstracted representations

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can help us understand this mental principle, and perhaps,too, something about the functions of brains.

Indeed, this principle parallels the arguments aboutbrain function and art put forward by another eminentneurobiologist who has turned his attention to the percep-tion of art: Semir Zeki. Zeki, who is a leading figure inthe study of the human visual system, discusses the per-ception of art in terms of the processing that the percep-tion entails through various areas of the visual cortex ofthe brain (Zeki 1998a). The main processing is done inthe region called V1. The importance of V1 to vision hasbeen known for some time. What has been discoveredmore recently (by Zeki among several others) is that V1is surrounded by, and connected to, other regions—calledV2–V5—that are largely responsible for very specializedvisual processing. V1 acts as a sorting office that sendssignals to the appropriate specialized visual regions, whichact in parallel but not in synchronicity (Zeki 1998b). Forexample, adequate colour vision is not possible without afunctioning V4, and V5 is necessary for effective pro-cessing of movement. This brain modularization can pro-vide a mechanism for the kind of abstraction thataccompanies isolating cues. It also suggests that aestheticsis also modular. Both Zeki and Oliver Sacks have writtenabout the same patient, Jonathan I, who is an artist who,as the result of an accident, suffered damage to V4 and isunable to perceive (even to perceive of ) colour (Sacks1995; Zeki 1999). This changed the kinds of art heappreciated and the kinds of art he produced. But themodularity of vision/art allowed him to develop a newblack and white painting style in which colour isabstracted away.

(e) The visual system as artist; the artist asneurologist

Zeki’s analysis of art and the brain uncovers deep paral-lels between the functions of the human visual system andthe functions of an artist. Zeki sees the main function ofboth as making a timeless sense of a continually changingenvironment. Again, this is a kind of abstraction. The realessence of the scene must be kept, while the distractingvagaries are thrown away. The visual system needs to dothis with the most fundamental of judgements. Forexample, to perceive something as being coloured redrequires the discounting of a large variation in the actualwavelengths of light that our visual system receives.3 Artand the brain is largely an exploration of how both artistsand human brains achieve this kind of abstraction. Byexploring this coincidence much can be learnt about thebrain: ‘… I hold the somewhat unusual view that artistsare neurologists, studying the brain with techniques thatare unique to them and reaching interesting but unspeci-fied conclusions about the organization of the brain’ (Zeki1998a). Studying the works of these artists allows us todiscover these ‘interesting but unspecified conclusions’about the brain. For example, the Fauvist group of pain-ters produced some works that are natural in outline butpainted in peculiar colours. The relationship betweenthese paintings and abstraction is interesting. Rather thanabstracting away any properties, by re-colouring theobjects they stand out in new ways. It turns out that themental processing of these paintings involves differentparts of the brain than the processing of naturally coloured

1290 R. Zimmer Abstraction in art

paintings. The implications of this fact for our under-standing of the brain are profound. Exploring how mindsand brains react to the perceptual experiments (what Zekicalls ‘techniques unique to [artists]’) inherent in someabstract art will lead to new insights about perceptionand conceptualization.

(f ) Perceptual problem solvingReturning to Ramachandran and Hirstein, one of the

principles enumerated above remains unexplored: percep-tual problem solving as reinforcing. The principle statesthat a picture whose interpretation requires the solutionto a puzzle can be more alluring than one whose meaningis direct. This principle is given surprisingly short shrift inthe article: indeed, there is no section about it in the mainbody of the text. As Tyler laments in his review of thearticle: ‘Had they included the section, perhaps it wouldhave included an extensive analysis of how the principleaccounts for many of the diverse manifestations of 20thcentury art . . .. Th[e] effort [required to solve perceptualproblems] itself forms an essential component of the artis-tic experience; by slowing down the perceptual processesof decoding the art work the viewer becomes aware oftheir evolution and interplay over time, and then experi-ences a sense of achievement when the full compositionfalls into place (or of continued mystery if it does not)’(Tyler 1999, p. 164).

The puzzles may not only slow down the apprehensionof a painting, but may also provide the beholder with amore obviously active role in the encounter.4 For example,consider Briony Fer’s account of a Malevich abstractpainting ‘Black Square powerfully expresses the fantasy ofa place of origin without actually inhabiting it. By fantasyI mean [following (Laplanche & Pontalis’s 1998) readingof Lacan] the putting in place of a scenario in which thespectator must play an active role. Human figures andobjects have been expelled from the pictures but there isalways at least one body which remains in this scene andthat is the spectator’s’ (Fer 1997, p. 10). This may gosome way to explaining the will to abstract in the firstplace and the sense of getting lost in an artwork.

4. CONCLUSIONS

This paper is part of a larger project, involving severalpeople at Goldsmith College, exploring relations amongcomputing, the arts, and cultural and psychological stud-ies; for descriptions of other parts of this project seeZimmer (2003). In this paper, relations between art andpsychology have been studied, with a particular focus onhow abstraction features in both. The paper was nevermeant to be conclusive; it was intended to raise new ques-tions. The main ambition for this paper, as set out in thepreamble, is to give the reader a sense that studyingabstraction in art can shed light on the issues of perceptionand concept manipulation.

The main method used was to review accounts ofabstraction in art and accounts of the psychology of art,and extract from these guidance towards the ways we canattain new insights about perceptual abstraction by study-ing abstraction in art. Gombrich provided the idea thatthe mental abstractions that lead to the creation of abstractpaintings are not immanent in the things being abstracted,

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B (2003)

but are somehow derived as a function of both the thingand the worldview (or schemata) of the beholder. Thiscan lead to explorations of how these schemata interactwith the perception of the world. Various Gestalt theoristswere seen to consider the perception of art as an activeprocess of structuring and organization, and concludedthat applying Gestalt principles to abstract art could be away of discovering things about abstraction in perception.Arnheim followed this path and discovered, among otherthings, that abstraction is a surprisingly basic part of per-ception. Ramachandran and Hirstein demonstrated thatthe use of the peak-shift principle could explain the wayabstractions exaggerate important features. This may leadto an explanation of all non-figurative art and may pointto particular connections between perceptual abstractionand brain function. These connections can be exploredby checking for similar brain reactions to some real worldreferents and some pure abstractions. Following Zeki, weinferred that the notion of modularity in the brain leadsto modularity in aesthetics, and certain kinds of modularabstractions. Artists were viewed as experimental epistem-ologists, and studying their experiments can lead to benignperceptual pathologies that will raise new questions andbring a new understanding of brain function and concep-tualization.

ENDNOTES1The idea that a child grasps global class characteristics first and differen-tiates only secondarily finds echoes in J. J. Gibson’s work on vision: ‘Theprogress of learning is from indefinite to definite, not from sensation toperception’.2In a related argument, Colin Martindale uses the peak-shift principle toexplain the evolution of painting styles (Martindale 1990).3It should be noted, in parallel to the Gombrich work on schemata dis-cussed above, that the ability to make this judgement is dependent on thebeholder having been raised in an environment with red things and in aculture that classifies red in that way.4For an account of the active role of the spectator in interactive, primarilydigital, art, see Zimmer (2003).

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