Rudolph Arnheim

Rudolf Arnheim
Arnheim (L) and Greg Bateson (R) speaking at the American Federation of Arts 48th Annual Convention, 1957 Apr 6 / Eliot Elisofon, photographer. American Federation of Arts records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
Born	(1904-07-15)July 15, 1904 Berlin, German Empire
Died	June 9, 2007(2007-06-09) (aged 102) Ann Arbor, Michigan
Nationality	German-American
Fields	Film theorist, psychologist
Alma mater	University of Berlin
Doctoral advisor	Max Wertheimer
Other academic advisors	Wolfgang Köhler Kurt Lewin

Rudolf Arnheim (July 15, 1904 – June 9, 2007) was a German-born author, 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. 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 America where he taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Harvard University, and the University of Michigan. He has greatly influenced art history and psychology in America.

Although Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye took fifteen months to complete, Arnheim stated that he felt that he essentially wrote it in one long sitting. In Art and Visual Perception, Arnheim tries to use science to better understand art, still keeping in mind the important aspects of personal bias, intuition, and expression. In his later book Visual Thinking (1969), Arnheim challenges the differences between thinking versus perceiving and intellect versus intuition. In it Arnheim critiques the assumption that language goes before perception and that words are the stepping stones of thinking. Sensory knowledge, for Arnheim, allows for the possibility of language, since the only access to reality we have is through our senses. Visual perception is what allows us to have a true understanding of experience. Arnheim also argues that perception is strongly identified with thinking, and that artistic expression is another way of reasoning. In his book titled The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts (1982), Arnheim addresses the interaction of art and architecture on concentric and grid spatial patterns. Arnheim argues that form and content are indivisible, and that the patterns created by artists reveal the nature of human experience.

Rudolf Arnheim was born into a Jewish family in 1904 on Alexanderplatz, in Berlin. 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. 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.