Art, Design and Gestalt Theory

Abstract

iiG estalt psychology began in Germany in 1910. While traveling by train on vacation, a 30-year-old Czech-born psychologist named Max Wertheimer was seized by an idea when he saw flashing lights at a railroad crossing that resembled lights encircling a theater marquee. He got off the train in Frankfurt am Main, where he bought a motion picture toy called a zoetrope (Fig. 1). When a strip of pictures is placed inside and viewed through the slits in a zoetrope, a succession of stationary pictures appear to be a single, moving picture. In his hotel room, Wertheimer made his own picture strips, consisting not of identifiable objects, but of simple abstract lines, ranging from vertical to horizontal. By varying these elements, he was able to investigate the conditions that contribute to the illusion of motion pictures, an effect that is technically known as apparent movement [1]. Years earlier, Wertheimer had studied in Prague with an Austrian philosopher named Christian von Ehrenfels, who had published a paper in 1890 entitled On Gestalt Qualities in which he pointed out that a melody is still recognizable when played in different keys, even though none of the notes are the same, and that abstract form attributes such as squareness or angularity can be conveyed by a wide range