Rudolf Arnhem

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Rudolf Arnheim (* 15. July 1904 in Berlin ; † 9. June 2007 in Ann Arbor , Michigan ) was a Jewish-born German - US -American media scholar , art psychologist and co-founder of modern art education.

He belonged to the group of German-English art scholars who, through forced emigration, assumed important bridging functions between European and American-Anglophone culture (cf. Aby Warburg , Erwin Panofsky , Ernst Gombrich , Ernst Kris ). Arnheim's work is assigned to art studies , media studies , aesthetics (philosophy) and psychology ( gestalt theory , gestalt psychology ). His significant academic contributions are in the areas of film theory , media art theory , architectural theory , art history and art education .

Life

Rudolf Arnheim was born in 1904 into a Jewish family on Alexanderplatz . Shortly after his birth, the family moved to Kaiserdamm in Charlottenburg and lived there until the early 1930s. Arnhem started drawing as a child and showed an early interest in art. His father Georg Arnheim owned a small piano factory and would have liked to see his son take over the business. But Rudolf insisted on studying at university, so the father finally gave in. At the age of 15 or 16, the young Rudolf Arnheim bought some first editions of Sigmund Freud's works, which encouraged his interest in psychoanalysis .

At the University of Berlin he studied experimental psychology and philosophy, as well as art history and music as minor subjects. The teaching staff at the Berlin University at that time also included Albert Einstein and Max Planck . Arnheim received his doctorate in 1928 from the founders of the Berlin Gestalt theory Max Wertheimer , Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Lewin . From 1925 onwards he was a staff member and from 1928 to 1933 culture editor and film critic of the weekly magazine Die Weltbühne founded by Siegfried Jacobsohn . After he had published an article in the Berliner Tageblatt in the fall of 1932 on the nature of Charlie Chaplin and Hitler's mustaches and the influence of the nose on human character, and since his book Film as Art was withdrawn from circulation after the Nazi seizure of power, he withdrew in August 1933 on the advice of some friends to Rome . There he worked until 1937 for the educational film institute of the League of Nations on a comprehensive encyclopedia of film. He was also co-editor of the film magazines Intercine and Cinema . In 1939 he went into exile in London and translated for the BBC's foreign service . But a year later he moved to New York .

Until 1942 he had a Rockefeller grant at the Office of Radio Research and a Guggenheim grant for a "translation of the Gestalt theory to the fine arts". From 1942 to 1969 he taught at the New School for Social Research in specialist art psychology and 1943-1966 at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. In 1959/60 he spent a teaching and study stay in Japan . In 1968 he became professor of art psychology at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University . From 1974 to 1984 he was a lecturer in art psychology at the Art History Institute of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor , where he devoted himself to scientific and literary activities and died on June 9, 2007 at the age of 102 in a retirement home. Part of his written estate is in the archive of the Academy of the Arts in Berlin.

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A contribution by Rudolf Arnheim in the Weltbühne from 1929

As the cultural editor of the weekly Die Weltbühne, he was responsible for the publication of one of the most important left-liberal cultural-political journals of the Weimar Republic, together with Carl von Ossietzky and Edith L. Jacobsohn between 1928 and 1933 . He has worked for major film magazines ( Cinema , Bianco e Nero , Sight and Sound ) and aesthetic magazines ( Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , British Journal of Aesthetics ).

Arnhem was already known as a film editor and theorist when he was just under 30. In his first theoretical book, Film als Kunst (1932), he vehemently advocated the possibilities of artistic film in relation to the emerging entertainment industry (especially since the invention of the talkies), and later withdrew into the niches of productive film culture: documentary, educational and avant-garde film. Likewise in the medium of radio: with broadcasting as audio art (manuscript 1933, first published in English in 1936 as radio ) he explores the artistic possibilities of radio, especially radio plays, thereby expanding his film theory into a theory of media art that is based on analyzes of sensory perception of gestalt theory.

Arnheim's fundamental achievement of Art and Visual Perception (1954) can be applied with a new justification to general aesthetics based on the perception theory of gestalt theory . The scientific view of starting from the testable alone was strictly adhered to. Based on Kurt Lewin's application of physical field theory to psychology, Arnheim applies field theory in the visual field, from simple basic configurations to compositional analyzes. In addition, the work offers a kind of design theory of the visual arts on the basis of the Gestalt theory.

Visual Thinking (1968) makes a sweeping attack against an idealistic, sensory theory of knowledge in order to theoretically justify thinking from the senses. Using the example of abstraction, Arnheim shows the close connection between conceptual and sensual abstraction. As a connoisseur of the Warburg School , he knows about the mnemonic function of images, defines them as perceptual containers of perception and thus as leading media in which linguistic links are first embedded: We think according to perception.

In 1976 he was made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In recognition of his services to the further development of gestalt theory, the international society for gestalt theory and its applications awarded him honorary membership in 1984. Arnhem was on the Advisory Board of Gestalt Theory magazine from its inception in 1978 until his death.

Awards

Rudolf Arnheim Award

The American Psychological Association presents the Rudolf Arnheim Award for Outstanding Achievement in Psychology and the Arts . Diana Deutsch received it in 2004 .

Works

  • 1928/2004: voice from the gallery. 25 small essays on the culture of time. (With a foreword by Hans Reimann and pictures by Karl Holtz ) Verlag Dr. Wilhelm Benary, Berlin (new edition Philo, Berlin 2004)
  • 1928: Experimental psychological investigations into the problem of expression (dissertation). Psychological Research, 11 , 2–132
  • 1932: film as art. Berlin: Ernst Rowohlt. New editions: 1974, 1979, 2002
  • 1936: Radio (English first publication of "Rundfunk als Hörkunst"). London: Faber & Faber
  • 1943: Gestalt and art. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2 , 71-5
  • 1954: Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press UCP
  • 1957: Film as Art (parts of "Film as Art"). ibid.
  • 1962: Picasso's Guernica . Genesis of a Painting. German v. Harro seal. UT Creation of a picture Rütten & Loening, Munich 1964
  • 1966: Toward a Psychology of Art. Ibid.
  • 1969/1989: Visual Thinking. ibid.
  • 1971/1983: Entropy and Art. An Essay on Disorder and Order. ibid.
  • 1972/1996: Illustrative thinking. To the unity of image and concept. First edition 1972, now Cologne: DuMont Taschenbuch 1996
  • 1974/1983: Art and Visual Perception. A Psychology of the Creative Eye. The New Version. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press
  • 1977/1979: Reviews and essays on the film (Ed .: Helmut H. Diederichs). Munich: Hanser / Frankfurt am Main: Fischer paperback
  • 1977: The Dynamics of Architectural Form. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press.
  • 1977: On the Psychology of Art. (German version of "Toward a Psychology of Art", 1966, translated by Hans Hermann). Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch
  • 1978: Art and Vision. A psychology of the creative eye. New version (German version of "Art and Visual Perception. The New Version", 1974, translated by H. Hermann, foreword by M. Diers). Berlin and New York: de Gruyter
  • 1979: Broadcasting as an audio art. Munich: Hanser. New edition: 2001 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp)
  • 1979: Entropy and Art. An experiment on disorder and order. (German edition of: "Entropy and Art", translated by the author). Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag (dumont pocket book 86)
  • 1980: The dynamics of architectural form. (German edition of "The Dynamics of Architectural Form", 1977, translated by Hans Hermann). Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag
  • 1982: The Power of the Center. A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Revised edition 1983
  • 1983/1996: The power of the middle. A composition lesson for the fine arts (German edition of "The Power of the Center", 1982, translated by the author). Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag (new edition 1996)
  • 1985: Heckling. Small essays from the years 1926–1940. Leipzig and Weimar: Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag
  • 1986: New Essays on the Psychology of Art. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press
  • 1988: The Power of the Center. Revised version. New edition. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press
  • 1989: Parables of Sun Light. Observations on Psychology, the Arts and the Rest. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press
  • 1990: Thoughts on Art Education. Los Angeles: Getty Center for Education, ISBN 978-0-89236-163-2
  • 1991: New contributions (German edition of "New Essays on the Psychology of Art", 1986, translated by Gerhard Ammelburger). Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag, ISBN 978-3-77012-341-4
  • 1992: To the Rescue of Art. Twenty-six Essays. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ISBN 978-0-52007-458-3
  • 1993: The magic of sight. Göttingen: Lamuv-Verlag, ISBN 978-3-88977-344-9
  • 1996: The Split and the Structure. Twenty-eight essays. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ISBN 978-0-52020-478-2
  • 1997: A wrong world. Fantastic novel. Hürth near Cologne: "Edition Memoria" Schumann, ISBN 3930353059
  • 2004: The soul in the silver layer (Ed .: Helmut H. Diederichs). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ISBN 3518292544
  • 2009: I baffi di Charlot. Scritti italiani sul cinema 1932-1938. (Ed .: Adriano D'Aloia). Turin: Kaplan, ISBN 978-88-89908-37-2

literature

  • Christian G. Allesch, O. Neumaier (ed.): Rudolf Arnheim or the art of perception. An interdisciplinary portrait . WUV, Vienna 2004, ISBN 3-85114-827-4 .
  • Kent Kleinman (Ed.): Rudolf Arnheim: revealing vision . University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 1997, ISBN 0-472-10859-X .
  • Ian Verstegen: Arnheim, Gestalt and Art: A Psychological Theory. Springer, Vienna and New York 2005, ISBN 978-3-211-28864-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/2/rudolfarnheim.php Interview with Rudolf Arnheim (English)
  2. ↑ Rudolf Arnheim Archive Inventory overview on the website of the Academy of the Arts in Berlin.
  3. ^ German literature archive Marbach: Rudolf Arnheim: Eine ververtte Welt. (No longer available online.) In: www.dla-marbach.de. Formerly in the original ; Retrieved September 4, 2015 .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.dla-marbach.de  
personal data
SURNAME Arnhem, Rudolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American media scientist and art psychologist
DATE OF BIRTH July 15, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH June 9, 2007
Place of death Ann Arbor , Michigan