Rudolf Arnheim facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Rudolf Arnheim
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Arnheim in the 1950s.
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| Born | July 15, 1904 |
| Died | June 9, 2007 (aged 102) |
| Nationality | German-American |
| Alma mater | University of Berlin |
| Known for | Formalist film theory |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Film theorist, psychologist |
| Doctoral advisor | Max Wertheimer |
| Other academic advisors | Wolfgang Köhler Kurt Lewin |
Rudolf Arnheim (born July 15, 1904 – died June 9, 2007) was a German-born writer and expert in art, film, and how we see things (perceptual psychology). He learned about Gestalt psychology from his teachers Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler at the University of Berlin. He then used these ideas to understand art better.
His most famous book was Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (1954). Other important books by Arnheim include Visual Thinking (1969) and The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts (1982). His book Art and Visual Perception was updated in 1974 and has been translated into fourteen languages. He lived in Germany, Italy, England, and the United States. In the U.S., he taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Harvard University, and the University of Michigan.
In Art and Visual Perception, he tried to use science to understand art. In his later book Visual Thinking (1969), Arnheim argued that seeing things comes before using words. He believed that we understand the world mainly through our senses. Arnheim also said that seeing is a type of thinking, and that creating art is another way of reasoning. In The Power of the Center, Arnheim looked at how art and buildings use circular and grid patterns. He believed that how something looks and what it means are connected. He also thought that the patterns artists create show us how humans experience the world.
Early Life
Rudolf Arnheim was born in 1904 in Berlin, Germany. His family moved when he was young and stayed in Charlottenburg until the 1930s. He loved art from a young age and started drawing as a child.
His father, Georg Arnheim, owned a small piano factory. Georg wanted Rudolf to take over the factory one day. But Rudolf wanted to keep studying. His father agreed that Rudolf could spend half his week at the university and half at the factory. Rudolf spent more time at the university. When he was at the factory, he kept asking questions about how pianos worked, which distracted the workers. So, his father let him focus only on his education. Rudolf was interested in psychology for a long time. He remembered buying some of Sigmund Freud's first books when he was about fifteen. These books made him very interested in psychoanalysis.
His Career and Studies
Arnheim went to the University of Berlin. He wanted to study psychology there. At that time, psychology was part of philosophy. So, Arnheim studied experimental psychology and philosophy. He also took classes in art history and music. Many famous teachers were at the university then, like Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Max Wertheimer, and Wolfgang Köhler. Because Wertheimer and Köhler were in the psychology department, most of the psychology taught was Gestalt psychology.
The psychology department was in the Imperial Palace. Arnheim worked in makeshift labs decorated with paintings. It felt more like a workshop because everyone was doing experiments together. For his main research project, Max Wertheimer asked him to study human facial expressions and handwriting. He looked at how people see expressions on faces and what they learn from handwriting. He also studied how these two things matched up. This was the start of Arnheim's study of expression, which he later applied to visual arts. He earned his doctorate degree in 1928.
In the mid-1920s, Arnheim started writing film reviews for a magazine called Stachelschwein. He also sent his writings to Die Weltbühne, another magazine, which published them. He worked on the cultural section of Die Weltbühne until 1933. In 1932, he wrote an essay about how people's looks can show their character. This was just a few months before the Nazis came to power in Germany. In 1933, his book Film as Art was no longer allowed to be sold by the Nazis. Because of this, some of Arnheim's friends told him he should leave the country. So, in August 1933, he moved to Rome, Italy.
Arnheim lived in Rome for six years, writing about film and radio. When World War II started, he moved to London, England. There, he worked as a translator for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) during the war. He moved to the United States in 1940. He was amazed by all the lights in New York City. For him, it felt like "the end of exile" because he had been used to living with constant blackouts in London.
In 1943, he became a psychology professor at Sarah Lawrence College. He also taught at the New School for Social Research. Around this time, he received two important awards. First, he got a Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation. This allowed him to work at Columbia University. He studied how radio shows (like soap operas) affected people in America. He also received the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1942 to study how people see art. He wanted to write a book about applying Gestalt theory to visual arts. But he felt he needed more research. So, he delayed the book to do more studies on space, expression, and movement. In 1951, Arnheim received another Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship. This let him take time off from teaching to write his famous book, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye.
In 1968, Arnheim was invited to join Harvard University as a Professor of the Psychology of Art. He stayed there for six years. The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard was important to him. It was the only building in America designed by Le Corbusier, and it was based on a design idea using measurements. He retired in 1974 and moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan with his wife, Mary. He became a Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan and taught there for ten years. Arnheim was part of the American Society for Aesthetics and was their president for two terms. He was also president for the Division on Psychology and the Arts of the American Psychological Association for three terms. In 1976, he was chosen as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He passed away in Ann Arbor in 2007.
His Main Ideas
Rudolf Arnheim believed that people have their most creative ideas when they are in their early twenties. He thought that people get hooked on one big idea and spend the rest of their lives exploring it. Arnheim's main idea was that the meaning of life and the world can be seen in the patterns, shapes, and colors around us. So, he believed we need to study these patterns to find out what they mean.
He thought that artwork is a way of thinking visually and a way to express yourself. It's not just putting shapes and colors together to look nice. Art helps people understand the world. It also shows how the world changes through your mind. Its purpose is to show the true nature of something, like our own existence. Overall, he wrote fifteen books about how we see things, and about art, buildings, and film.
See also
- Spatial visualization ability
In Spanish: Rudolf Arnheim para niños
