Anton Ehrenzweig

Who was Anton Ehrenzweig?

Anton Ehrenzweig a trained lawyer who was very interested in modern art and modern music and who abandoned his formal career after fleeing Austria after the "Anschluss" with Germany in 1938. He studied law, psychology and art in Vienna and settled in England in 1938. He was a lecturer in Art Education at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He wrote The Psychoanalysis of Artistic Vision and Hearing and The Hidden Order of Art. He also published numerous articles. His ideas can be summarized as the discovery of the organizing role of the unconscious mind in any act of creativity & an analysis of the layered structure of the unconscious mind & of the dynamic mental processes which an artist undergoes in the creative act.

The Hidden Order of Art has been in continuous publication since 1967, and is considered one of the three classics of art psychology, along with Rudolf Arnheim's Art and Visual Perception and Herschel Chipp's Theories of Modern Art.

Ehrenzweig wrote the introduction to the catalogue for an early show by Bridget RIley at London's Gallery One, May 1962. He also reviewed one of her exhibitions for "Art International" in February 1965.