Rudolf Arnheim: biography of this German psychologist and philosopher.

A summary of the life of Rudolf Arnheim, influential philosopher and psychologist of the Gestalt movement.

Rudolf Arnheim was a German psychologist and philosopher who, influenced by Gestalt psychology and in addition to his interest in art, focused his career on the understanding of visual perception and thinking, as well as various aesthetic phenomena.

He was a prolific author who, added to the fact that he lived more than a century, allowed him to write many articles and books focused both on art and on the influence of the great media of his time, including film, radio and television.

In the following, we will look at the life of this researcher through a biography of Rudolf ArnheimWe will know his main works and we will also approach his philosophical-artistic thought.

Brief biography of Rudolf Arnheim

The life of Rudolf Arnheim is long, something that if we take into account that he was a great writer results in a very extensive work, both in the form of books and articles and research. His early years were turbulent as he witnessed the outbreak of the two world wars, having to flee from his homeland.He was forced to flee his native Germany in the 1930s because he was a descendant of Jews and a critic, albeit in the form of artistic criticism, of Nazi pretensions.

In his flight he visited several countries, arriving in the promising United States of the mid-twentieth century, a country of peace and great intellectuality that convinced him to spend the rest of his life in North American territory. There he would have the opportunity to receive several scholarships for his more than excellent work, and also served as a professor at several universities, including the prestigious Harvard. In addition, he would continue researching on art and aesthetics, relating it to gestalt psychology, being visual perception the distinctive theme of his work.

Early years

Rudolf Arnheim was born on July 15, 1904 in Berlin, Germany, into a Jewish family.He was born to a Jewish family living on the famous Alexanderplatz, although shortly after his birth they moved to Charlottenburg.

Rudolf was already interested in art from a very young age, entertaining himself in his free time by drawing. He also showed an interest in psychology, buying books by Sigmund Freud at the age of 15, thus initiating his interest in psychoanalysis.

Although Arnheim showed clear pretensions towards academic life, Georg Arnheim, his father, intended to have him work in the family business, his piano factory.his piano factory. Thus, Mr. Arnheim's idea was that his son, once he was old enough, would take over the workshop, thus having a steady and stable job.

But already young Rudolf was showing signs that this was not quite right for him, which led his father to accept the idea that, when it was time to study, Arnheim should spend half the week at the university and the other half working in the family business.

But, to Rudolf's good fortune, his father eventually came around to the idea that the young man was much better off studying all week.. The reason for this was that the Arnheim was beginning to distract the other workers in the workshop by explaining his knowledge of the mechanics behind the piano instead of assembling it.

Studying at university

When the time came, Rudolf Arnheim enrolled at the University of Berlin where he wanted to study psychology. At that time psychology was still a young discipline and was still framed within philosophy as a branch, which is why Arnheim enrolled in philosophy, but studied both experimental psychology and more theoretical branches.

The University of Berlin was a place of much culture and science before the outbreak of World War II. As the nerve center of the German intelligentsia, many were the great figures of his time with whom Arnheim had the opportunity to establish contact, among them Albert Einstein, Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, Kurt Lewin, Max Planck and Wolfgang Köhler. Of all these figures, Köhler and Wertheimer are the most outstanding.Wertheimer, since they worked in the psychology department of the faculty and as followers of Gestalt, greatly influenced Arnheim, who would also end up following its postulates and applying them in his academic career.

Wertheimer himself proposed to his pupil Arnheim to do the dissertation on how human facial expressions and writing could correspond. Thus, Rudolf Arnheim studied how people perceive an expression while looking at a face and what they perceive when they see a handwritten text. In 1928 he received his doctorate at the Humboldt Universität with his work "Psychological-experimental investigations on the problem of expression".

The gray years

After finishing his studies, Rudolf Arnheim began a period of happy beginnings but sad endings. It was around this time that began to write film reviews, which brought him into contact with Siegfried Jacobsohn, the editor-in-chief ofThese texts put him in contact with Siegfried Jacobsohn, the editor-in-chief of "Die Weltbühne", who accepted them for publication.

This magazine was very important in the German cultural scene and discussed politics, art and economics. Shortly after Jacobsohn died, being succeeded by Carl von Ossietzky who accepted Arnheim to work in the cultural section of the magazine until 1933.

In the fall of 1932 Arnheim published an essay in the "Berliner Tageblatt" in which he addressed the nature of Charlie Chaplin's and Adolf Hitler's mustaches, explaining how their peculiar style completely changed the perceived appearance of the nose and the character associated with the wearer. Ironically, this essay would end up being censored three months later with the Nazis coming to power.

After this incident, Arnheim as well as several of his friends saw the approaching gray years for Germany that began with the first censorship and persecution of books by Nazism. and persecutions of books by the Nazis. In fact, in 1933 the sale of his book "Film als Kunst" (Film as Art) was forbidden, something that made him decide to leave his country in August of that same year.

The first destination of his exile was Rome, a city where he would write about cinema and radio, staying there for six months. Unfortunately, with the outbreak of World War II and Italy's affiliation with the Third Reich, Arnheim decided to flee to London where he would work as a war translator for the BBC..

In 1940 he decided to jump across the pond to the United States. Arnheim was captivated when he set foot on American soil, especially when he visited cosmopolitan New York, a city full of magical lights and where the intellectuals of the time, both American and those who had fled Europe, gathered in a maelstrom of innovative ideas.

Academic life and final years

While the Second World War was still raging, in 1943 Rudolf Arnheim was appointed professor of psychology at Sarah Lawrence College and also became a visiting professor at the New School for Social Research.. It was at this same time that he received a Rockefeller Foundation grant, allowing him to have a small livelihood in a truly uncertain time for any German exile.

A little later he would have the opportunity to work at Columbia University, specifically in its Office of Radio Research, where he devoted himself to analyzing how American soap operas influenced the American audience in the 1940s.

In 1951 Arnheim again won a Rockefeller Fellowship, which allowed him to step away from the world of university teaching for a time to devote himself fully to writing his book "Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye".

After years of living in the United States and a prolific academic life, he chose to make the U.S. his place of residence. His success in the North American university environment was staged with the fact that in 1968 he was invited by Harvard University to work as a professor of art psychology.where he taught for six years.

At the end of his period at Harvard in 1974 he decided to reside permanently in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with his wife Mary, and was seen on more than one occasion as a visiting professor at the University of Michigan, where he would teach for the next ten years. It was during this same period, specifically in 1976, that he was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Arnheim Arnheim was a member of the American Society for Aesthetics and became its president on two occasions, as well as president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.He was also the president of the Division of Psychology and the Arts of the American Psychological Association on three occasions. In addition to these honors, in 1999 he received the Helmut-Käutner Award, one of his last merits before his death in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on June 9, 2007, at the age of 102.

Artistic-philosophical thought

Describing Rudolf Arnheim's thinking in a few paragraphs is certainly complicated. Although he was a psychologist, it is unquestionable that as a follower of the Gestalt school and an art as a follower of the Gestalt school and art scholar, we can refer to his thought as something that combines the artistic with the philosophical, even in his reflections on the media, which, as tools of mass communication, are a tool of mass communication.Arnheim's thoughts, even in his reflections on the media, which, as tools of mass communication, greatly influence the thinking and artistic currents of society.

Arnheim considered that the senses make it possible to understand external reality.. These should not be seen as mere mechanical instruments, as something by which we capture information without further ado, but, at the active instance of perception, they function as bridges of visual thought, even without the stimulus being necessarily visual. The mind adds information to sensory perceptions and thus knowledge is elaborated.

Throughout his life he studied multiple expressions of art, including those coming from cinema, radio and television, which, although they clashed with the idea of traditional art, he was very clear that they were indeed artistic representations. For Arnheim, and very much in tune with many movements of his time such as the avant-garde movements, art is not obliged to faithfully reproduce reality, but can explore and artificially recreate other solutions, which can even supplant the perception of reality itself.

This idea that art does not have to reflect reality itself he made from his analyses of cinema. When we see a film we get the sensation of seeing movement, but in reality what we are seeing are rapid flows of images that generate the perception of action. We mistake seeing for thinking, the static for the dynamic, the still for the moving.

But in addition to purely perceptual confusion, he also explored how the mass media can manage public opinion. Arnheim saw the birth and popularity of television, a mass media that was already proving to be a double-edged sword at the beginning of its irruption into American society in the middle of the 20th century. Television could be a great element of communication, enriching the culture of the moment, but it could also entertain, manipulate and divert public opinion from issues that did not appear on the screen.