Michael Leyton's book, The Structure of Paintings, is a tour de force that deserves to become a classic and must-read for psychologists, cognitive scientists, graphic designers and, generally, any educated reader interested in compositional structure in the visual arts. In the past two decades, vision and object perception have become highly scientific and mathematical subjects that have left the province of the Humanities. The focus has been on perception as a computational skill that lives under the radar of conscious experience and artistic composition. It is thus a rare treat to see a fresh and insightful perspective brought to the study of artistic composition that can actually serve as a text for courses in the psychology of art and graphic design.



Leyton's ideas are rigorous, systematic and insightful and, most importantly, highly accessible. He approaches his reader in a reassuring and encouraging voice and never claims what he cannot show and show again in clear and simple illustrations, color slides, and prose. He demonstrates how simple shapes we confront everyday--protrusions, indents, compactions, bays, and shields--are the building blocks of our ability to see artistic composition at work. He convincingly demonstrates how our human ability to recognize these shapes for what they are depends upon our ability to see their evolution over time. He makes us understand how these shapes and their temporal interplay form the tension and resolution of positive and negative space in a painting. He shows, finally, how the deft use of these tensions and resolutions within a work of art can bring out masterful spatial stories in the composition through which we recognize great art. In the course of providing these exhilarating lessons, Leyton treats us to a gallery of artistic masters--Picasso, Raphael. Cezanne, de Kooning, Moore, Balthus, Ingres, Modigliani--forever changing the way we look at and understand them.

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