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It is with deep sadness that we announce the death of Michael Wertheimer (1927 - 2022)
The "Essentials of Gestalt Theoretical Psychotherapy" offer for the first time in English an insight into the guiding ideas of this integrative psychotherapy method,
Symposium dedicated to Ugo Savardi
Macerata (Italy), 6-7 April 2022
Gestalt Theory and Visual Arts
According to Gestalt theory, the processes of perception and imagination do not comply with logical or rational rules, but rather follow and testify to an aesthetic order of sensual experience (“Gestalt laws”). The aesthetics of sensuality are consolidated by the production of the arts, concentrating creative and perceptive processes in prototypical patterns (pulse, symmetry, polarity) and at the same time introducing ambiguity, overload and metamorphosis in the order of perception.
The Berlin school of Gestalt theory focused its interest on the mechanisms of grouping and regrouping in the visual field. Because of the particular research interests of its early representatives, the Gestalt theory is most frequently applied to visual arts. Hardly explored, however, is its connection to core concepts of aesthetics (anthroposophy, Russian formalism) and of art theory (avant-garde, Bauhaus), whose main exponents defined themselves as experts of formation and figuration in the visual field (Kandinsky, Klee, Alpers, Moholy-Nagy, Kepes).