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Rudolf Arnheim Biography

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.

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Rudolf Arnheim Quotes

The arts, as a reflection of human existence at its highest, have always and spontaneously lived up to this demand of plenitude. No mature style of art in any culture has ever been simple.

Art, Culture, Human, Reflection, Simple, Style

The more perfect our means of direct experience, the more easily we are caught by the dangerous illusion that perceiving is tantamount to knowing and understanding.

Mean, Knowing, Perfect, Tantamount, Easily, Direct

But art not only exploits the variety of appearances, it also affirms the validity of individual outlook and thereby admits a further dimension of variety. Since the shapes of art do not primarily bear witness to the objective nature of the things for which they stand, they can reflect individual interpretation and invention.

Affirms, Art, Bears, Individual, Shapes, Witness

The arts are neglected because they are based on perception, and perception is disdained because it is not assumed to involve thought.

Art, Disdained, Neglected, Perception

Order is a prerequisite of survival; therefore the impulse to produce orderly arrangements is inbred by evolution.

Order, Survival, Inbreds, Inbred, Produce, Orderly

Once it is recognized that productive thinking in any area of cognition is perceptual thinking, the central function of art in general education will become evident.

Art, Cognition, Function, General, Productive, Thinking

Form is sometimes considered a mere spice added by the artist to the representation of objects in order to make it pleasurable.

Artist, Considered, Order, Spices

No mature style of art in any culture has ever been simple. In certain cultures, an overall symmetry may conceal the complexity of the work at first glance.

Art, Simple, Style, Cultures, Symmetry, Work

The rehabilitation of order as a universal principle, however, suggested at the same time that orderliness by itself is not sufficient to account for the nature of organized systems in general or for those created by man in particular.

Men, Order, Orderliness, Particular, Principles, Universal

Seeing consists of the grasping of structural features rather than the indiscriminate recording of detail.

Details, Features, Grasping, Recording, Statistics

The dance, just as the performance of the actor, is kinesthetic art, art of the muscle sense. The awareness of tension and relaxation within his own body, the sense of balance that distinguishes the proud stability of the vertical from the risky adventures of thrusting and falling--these are the tools of the dancer.

Art, Dance, Fall, Relaxation, Stability

The experienced physician, mechanic, or physiologist looking at a wound, an engine, a microscopic preparation, "sees" things the novice does not see. If both, experts and laymen, were asked to make exact copies of what they see, their drawings would be quite different.

Drawing, Preparation, Physicians, Experienced, Novice, Drawings

Variety is more than a means of avoiding boredom, since art is more than an entertainment of the senses.

Art, Blessing, Boredom, Entertainment, Mean, Variety

All perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also invention.

Intuition, Invention, Perceiving, Perception, Reasoning, Thinking

Entropy theory, on the other hand, is not concerned with the probability of succession in a series of items but with the overall distribution of kinds of items in a given arrangement.

Arrangement, Entropy, Hands, Probability Theory, Science, Theory

No longer can we consider what the artist does to be a self-contained activity, mysteriously inspired from above, unrelated and unrelatable to other human activities. Instead, we recognize the exalted kind of seeing that leads to the creation of great art as an outgrowth of the humbler and more common activity of the eyes in everyday life. Just as the prosaic search for information is "artistic" because it involves giving and finding shape and meaning, so the artist's conceiving is an instrument of life, a refined way of understanding who and where we are.

Art, Common, Eye, Refined, Self, Unrelated

It is good to live in a country where all are immigrants. . . the newcomer is simply the latest arrival.

Country, Newcomers, Immigrants, Newcomer

It would be most wholesome if for at least twenty years art historians were forbidden to refer to any derivations. If they were not allowed to account for a work of art mainly by tracing where it comes from, they would have to deal with it in and by itself--which is what they are most needed for.

Art, Refer, Twenties, Twenty, Years

Every act is a visual judgement.

Act, Choices, Judgement, Visual, Visuals

The fundamental peculiarity of the photographic medium; the physical objects themselves print their image by means of the optical and chemical action of light.

Mean, Light, Fundamentals, Peculiarity, Physical, Fundamental

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