Rudolf Arnheim

Rudolf Arnheim (July 15, 1904 – June 9, 2007) was a German-born writer, art and film theorist, and perceptual psychologist. He learned Gestalt psychology from studying under Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler at the University of Berlin and applied it to art.The Intelligence of Vision: An Interview with Rudolf Arnheim
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His magnum opus was his book ''Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye'' (1954). Other major books by Arnheim have included ''Visual Thinking'' (1969), and ''The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts'' (1982). ''Art and Visual Perception'' was revised, enlarged and published as a new version in 1974, and it has been translated into fourteen languages. He lived in Germany, Italy, England, and the U.S., where he taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Harvard University, and the University of Michigan.

In ''Art and Visual Perception'', he tried to use science to better understand art. In his later book ''Visual Thinking'' (1969), Arnheim critiqued the assumption that language goes before perception. For Arnheim, the only access to reality we have is through our senses. Arnheim argued that perception is strongly identified with thinking, and that artistic expression is another way of reasoning. In ''The Power of the Center'', Arnheim addressed the interaction of art and architecture on concentric and grid spatial patterns. He argued that form and content are indivisible, and that the patterns created by artists reveal the nature of human experience.

Early years

Rudolf Arnheim was born into a Jewish family in 1904 on Alexanderplatz, in Berlin.Rudolf Arnheim: The Little Owl on the Shoulder of Athene
/ref> Not long after he was born, his family moved to Kaiserdamm in Charlottenburg, where they stayed until the early 1930s. He was interested in art from a young age, as he began drawing as a child.A Conversation with Rudolf Arnheim
/ref> His father, Georg Arnheim, owned a small piano factory, and Georg Arnheim's plan for his son was for him to take over the factory. However, Rudolf wanted to continue his education, so his father agreed that he could spend half his week at the university and the other half at the factory. Rudolf ended up spending more time at the university, and when he was at the factory he was distracting the employees with his inquisitions about the mechanics of the piano, so his father agreed to let him focus entirely on his education. Rudolf was interested in psychology as long as he could remember, with his specific memory of buying some of the first editions of Sigmund Freud's books when he was fifteen or sixteen. These fueled his interest in psychoanalysis.

Career

Arnheim attended the University of Berlin, where he wished to focus his studies on psychology. At that time, psychology was a branch of philosophy, so Arnheim ended up majoring in experimental psychology and philosophy, and minoring in art history and music. There were many prominent faculty members at the university at this time, among them were Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Max Wertheimer, and Wolfgang Köhler. Because Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler were in the psychology department, most of the psychology concerned Gestalt psychology. The Psychological Institute of Berlin University was located on two floors of the Imperial Palace, so Arnheim worked in makeshift laboratories decorated with paintings of angels and other artwork. This institute was more of a workshop because everyone was doing experiments and using each other rather than sitting in lectures. For Arnheim's dissertation, Max Wertheimer asked him to study human facial expressions and handwriting and how they corresponded. He looked at the extent to which people perceive an expression when they look at a face and what they perceive from a person's handwriting, as well as how the two corresponded. This was the beginning of Arnheim's study of expression, which he moved to looking at with visual arts. In 1928, he received his doctorate.

In the mid-1920s, Arnheim started to write film criticism for the ''Stachelschwein''. Meanwhile, he sent his works to Siegfried Jacobsohn, the chief editor at ''Die Weltbühne'', who accepted them. When Jacobsohn died in 1928, Ossietzky took over and then Arnheim worked on the cultural section until 1933. In the fall of 1932, Arnheim had an essay published in the ''Berliner Tageblatt'', about three months before the Nazis came to power. The essay was about the nature of Charlie Chaplin's and Adolf Hitler's moustaches and what the moustache did to the nose in terms of human character. Considering the timing of this essay, and the fact that in 1933 the sale of his book ''Film as Art'' was no longer permitted due to the Nazis, some of Arnheim's friends advised him that he should leave the country and so, in August 1933, he moved to Rome. Arnheim lived and wrote about film and radio in Rome for the next six years. When World War II broke out, he moved to London, and he worked as a wartime translator for the British Broadcasting Corporation
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