Rudolf Arnheim
Rudolf Arnheim ( born July 15, 1904 in Berlin, † June 9, 2007 in Ann Arbor, Michigan ) was a German -born Jewish - American media theorist, art psychologist and co-founder of modern art education.
He belonged to the circle of Anglo-German art historian, by forced emigration important bridging functions between the European and American- Anglophone culture took over (see Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky, Ernst Gombrich, Ernst Kris ). Arnheim's work is art history, media studies, aesthetics associated (philosophy) and psychology ( Gestalt theory, Gestalt psychology ). His major scientific contributions are in the fields of film theory, media art theory, architectural theory, art history and art education.
Life
Arnhem was from 1925 to employees and 1928-1933 cultural editor and film critic, founded by Siegfried Jacobsohn weekly paper the world stage. He received his doctorate in Berlin in 1928 when the founders of the Berlin Gestalt theory Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Lewin. In 1933 he moved due to political and racial persecution to Rome, where he worked until 1937 for the Educational Film Institute of the League for a comprehensive encyclopedia of the 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 Foreign Service of the BBC. But a year later he moved to New York.
By 1942, he had a Rockefeller Fellowship at the Office of Radio Research and a Guggenheim Fellowship for a "translation of Gestalt theory to the visual arts ." From 1942 to 1969 he taught at the New School for Social Research in art and psychology from 1943 to 1966 at the Sarah Lawrence College in New York. 1959/60 he spent teaching and studying in Japan. He became professor of psychology at the Art Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University in 1968. From 1974 to 1984 he was a lecturer in psychology at the art institute of art history at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he devoted himself to scientific and literary activities, and on 9 June 2007, died in a nursing home at the age of 102 years.
Work
With his dissertation on the expression problem Arnhem established the subject of the psychology of expression.
As a cultural editor of the weekly magazine The World Stage 1928-33 he was responsible, together with Carl von Ossietzky and Edith L. Jacobsohn publishing one of the major left - liberal cultural and political magazines of the Weimar Republic. He worked for major film magazines ( Cinema, Bianco e Nero, Sight and Sound ) and aesthetic journals (Journal of Aesthtetics and Art Criticism, the British Journal of Aesthetics ).
Even with nearly 30 years of Arnhem was known as film editor and theorist. In his first theoretical book film as an art (1932 ), he represents vehemently the possibilities of artistic film to the emerging entertainment industry ( the talkies destroyed in 1930 radically changed the scope for experimental filmmaking ), taking place later in the niches productive film culture: Documentary, Educational - and avant-garde film. Likewise, in the medium of radio: With radio as Hörkunst ( manuscript in 1933, first published in English in 1936 as a radio) he explored the artistic possibilities of radio, especially radio plays and is expanding its film theory to a theory of media art that according to each case in the study of sensory perception of Gestalt theory are constructed.
Arnheim's basic performance of Art and Visual Perception (1954 ) can be applied with a new justification for the overall aesthetics based on the perception theory of Gestalt theory. The scientific opinion to go out alone from testable, was strictly kept. Based on Kurt Lewin's application of the physical field theory on the psychology turns Arnhem to the field theory in the visual range from simple basic configurations up to composition analysis. In addition, the work provides a kind of design theory of the visual arts on the basis of Gestalt theory.
Visual Thinking (1968 ) brings to the sweeping blow against an idealistic sense hostile theory of knowledge, in order to establish a way of thinking through the senses theoretically. Arnhem uses the example of the abstraction on the close relationship of conceptual abstraction to the sensual. As a connoisseur of the Warburg school, he knows about the mnemonic function of the images, they defined as perceptual perception container and thus as a key media in which to embed linguistic links only: We think perceptually.
In recognition of his contribution to the development of Gestalt theory to him, the international Society for Gestalt Theory and its Applications awarded honorary membership in 1984. The Advisory Board of the journal shape Theory belonged to Arnhem from its beginnings in 1978 until his death.
Awards
Rudolf Arnheim Award
The American Psychological Association gives the Rudolf Arnheim Award for Outstanding Achievement in Psychology and the Arts. In 2004 it was Diana German.