Rudolf Arnheim: Biography Of This German Psychologist And Philosopher
Rudolf Arnheim was a German psychologist and philosopher who, influenced by Gestalt psychology and adding 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 for more than a century, allowed him to write many articles and books focused on both art and the influence of the great media of his time, including cinema, radio and television.
Next we will see the life of this researcher through a biography of Rudolf Arnheim we will learn about his main works and we will also address his philosophical-artistic thinking.
Rudolf Arnheim’s life 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 both world wars having to flee his native Germany in the 1930s due to his condition as a descendant of Jews and critical, even in the form of artistic criticism, of Nazi pretensions.
During his escape he visited several countries, arriving in the promising United States of the mid-20th 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 he also served as a professor at several universities, including the prestigious Harvard. In addition to this, he would continue researching art and aesthetics, relating it to Gestalt psychology, with visual perception being the distinctive theme of his work.
Early years
Rudolf Arnheim was born on July 15, 1904 in Berlin, Germany within a Jewish family residing in the famous Alexanderplatz, although shortly after his birth they would move to Charlottenburg.
Little Rudolf already showed interest in art from a very young age, entertaining himself by drawing in his free time. He also showed interest in psychology, buying books by Sigmund Freud when he was only 15 years old, thus beginning 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. Thus, Mr. Arnheim’s idea was that his son, once she reached sufficient age, would take charge of the workshop, thus having a permanent and stable job.
But young Rudolf was already showing signs that this was not going well with him, which made his father end up accepting the idea that, when the time came to study, Arnheim would go half the week to the university and the other half of the week he would go to school. focus on working on the family business.
But, fortunately for Rudolf, His father ended up accepting the idea that the young man was much better off studying all week The reason for this was that the Arnheim began to distract the other workers in the workshop by explaining his knowledge about the mechanics behind the piano instead of assembling them.
Studying at the 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 German intellectuality, Arnheim had the opportunity to establish contact with many of the great figures of his time, including Albert Einstein, Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, Kurt Lewin, Max Planck and Wolfgang Köhler. Of all these figures, Köhler and Wertheimer are the most notable since they worked in the psychology department of the faculty and as followers of Gestalt they 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 from the Humboldt University with his work “Psychological-experimental investigations on the problem of expression”.
gray years
After finishing his studies, Rudolf Arnheim began a period of happy beginnings but sad endings. It is around this time that start writing reviews about cinema texts which put him in contact with Siegfried Jacobsohn, the chief editor of “Die Weltbühne”, who accepted them for publication.
This magazine was very important in the German cultural scene and talked about politics, art and economics. Shortly after Jacobsohn would die, being succeeded by Carl von Ossietzky who would accept Arnheim to work in the magazine’s cultural section until 1933.
In the autumn of 1932 Arnheim published an essay in the Berliner Tageblatt in which he addressed the nature of the mustaches of Charlie Chaplin and Adolf Hitler, explaining how their peculiar style completely modified the perceived appearance of the nose and the character associated with those who they carried it Ironically, this essay would end up being censored three months later with the Nazis coming to power.
After this incident, Both Arnheim and several of his friends saw that gray years were approaching for Germany, beginning with the first censorships and book persecutions by Nazism. In fact, in 1933 the sale of his book “Film als Kunst” (Cinema as art) was prohibited, 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 at the BBC
In 1940 he decided to jump across the pond, ending up in the United States. Arnheim was captivated when he set foot on North American soil, especially when visiting cosmopolitan New York, a city full of magical lights and where the intellectuals of the time, both Americans and those who fled from Europe, met in a whirlwind of innovative ideas.
Academic life and final years
While the Second World War was still in progress, in 1943 Rudolf Arnheim He obtained the position of professor of psychology at Sarah Lawrence College and would also become a visiting professor at the New School for Social Research It is at this same time that he received a scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation, allowing him to have a small livelihood in a truly uncertain time for every German exile.
A little later he would have the opportunity to work at Columbia University, specifically in its Radio Research Office, where he dedicated himself to analyzing how American soap operas or “soap operas” influenced the American audience of the decade. from the 1940s.
In 1951 Arnheim again won a Rockefeller scholarship, which allowed him to step away from the world of university teaching for a time to dedicate himself fully to writing his book “Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye.” and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye”).
After living in the United States for years and his academic life was already prolific, he chose to make that country his place of residence. His success in the American university environment was highlighted by the fact that in 1968 he was invited by Harvard University to work as a professor of art psychology where he would teach 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 is in this same period, specifically in 1976, that he was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Arnheim He was part of the American Society of Aesthetics and became its president on two occasions , in addition to also being the president of the Division of Psychology and the Arts at the American Psychological Association on three occasions. In addition to these honors, in 1999 he received the Helmut-Käutner Prize, one of his last honors before he died in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on June 9, 2007, at the age of 102.
Describing in a few paragraphs what Rudolf Arnheim’s thought is like is certainly complicated. Although he was a psychologist, there is no doubt that 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 that, as tools of mass communication, greatly influence the thinking and artistic currents of society.
Arnheim considered that the senses allow us to understand external reality These should not be seen as mere mechanical instruments, as something through which we simply capture information, but rather, at the active request of perception, they function as bridges of visual thought, even without the stimulus necessarily being visual. The mind adds information to sensory perceptions and thus knowledge is produced.
Throughout his life he studied multiple expressions of art, including those from cinema, radio and television that, 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 line with many movements of his time such as avant-garde movements, art is not obliged to faithfully reproduce reality, but can explore and artificially recreate other solutions, which can even supplant its own. perception of reality.
He made this idea that art does not have to reflect reality in itself from his analyzes of cinema When we watch a movie 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 confuse seeing with thinking, the static with the dynamic, the still with the mobile.
But in addition to the merely perceptual confusion, he also explored how the mainstream media can manipulate public opinion. Arnheim saw the birth and popularity of television, a mass media that already appeared to be a double-edged sword at the beginning of its emergence into North American society in the mid-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 do not appear on the screen.
