Jack Burnham’s The Structure of Art examines art as a changing system of relations between perception, symbol, technology and culture.

Moving across modernism, abstraction, sculpture, semiotics, psychology and structuralism, Burnham asks what kinds of mental and social structures make particular forms of art possible, and how those structures alter as both artistic practice and theories of perception change.

He looks at the wider intellectual history of figures like Piaget, Lévi-Strauss, Chomsky, with works from Monet, Mondrian, Henry Moore and Minimalism sitting beside. This sort of produces an account of art as something generated through patterns of cognition rather than simply individual expression. Burnham’s diagrams and image-text comparisons give the argument an almost schematic character, but the ambition is substantial: to build a structural model capable of explaining why art changes form, what those changes reveal about perception, and how modern art repeatedly strips away inherited visual conventions in order to expose the systems underneath them.

George Braziller, New York, 1973. Revised edition, second printing. Paperback. Moderate rubbing, edge wear and creasing to covers, with some corner wear; internally clean and sound.