The Science of Art: The Universality of the Law of Contrast

Abstract

Visual contrast appears to be an important factor in the appreciation of paintings. However, it has not been determined whether and how the effect of contrast differs between painting characteristics and whether and how it differs between people. We investigated whether the effect of contrast generalizes across cultures, variations in initial contrast levels (i.e., the amount of contrast in the digital reproductions of an original painting) between paintings, painting types (i.e., representational or abstract), and social and cognitive–aesthetic factors (e.g., age, education, art expertise). Our results indicated that people consistently favor high-contrast versions of paintings over their low-contrast counterparts; this effect is stronger for abstract paintings and paintings with a low or moderate initial contrast level; this effect is not influenced by culture, social factors, or cognitive–aesthetic factors; and surprisingly, the aesthetic value of digitized original paintings can be increased by increasing their contrast value. In short, we found empirical support against the universal importance of contrast in relation to painting characteristics but in favor of the universal importance of contrast in relation to people characteristics.

Moderate Contrast in the Evaluation of Paintings Is Liked More but Remembered Less than High Contrast

“…Stimuli were 100 abstract digitized paintings from digital collections of five established European museums from 1,888 and onward (see Van Dongen and Zijlmans, 2017, for more information). To avoid issues of familiarity, famous or well-known paintings were not included.…”

“…As people recognize high contrast objects more easily (Reber et al, 1998; Reber and Schwarz, 2001), the second question is whether observers would also remember these high contrast art forms better as well. The evidence for a greater likeability of art forms with high contrast (Reber et al, 2004; Shieh and Lai, 2008; Tinio and Leder, 2009a,b; Van Dongen and Zijlmans, 2017) has been discussed above. The answers to the other two questions, however, have not, and form the topic of our investigation.…”

“…The first question is what happens under more extreme conditions of contrast compared to the levels of contrast tested before (Van Dongen and Zijlmans, 2017). One outcome could be that appreciation would increase further with increased contrast given the ease of processing in high contrast conditions.…”

“…Van Dongen and Zijlmans (2017) manipulated contrast levels in digitized paintings by presenting a lowered luminosity contrast and a heightened luminosity contrast version of a painting to participants. They viewed a pair of paintings with different contrast levels after which they judged which painting they liked better.…”

“…Alternatively, it is feasible that the benefit of processing fluency at a certain level of contrast, diminishes in the sense that at such a high contrast level there is no further benefit for processing which results in stimuli being appreciated less than at a moderate contrast level. Evidence for this notion is that paintings with initially low contrast were appreciated more when contrast level was manipulated to be higher than for paintings that were already high in contrast initially (Van Dongen and Zijlmans, 2017). This would suggest that art appreciation, as a function of contrast, would asymptotically level off or look like an inverted U-curve with peak sensitivity and peak preferences at an intermediate level (Spehar et al, 2015).…”