Rudolf Arnheim
Rudolf Arnheim
Rudolf Arnheimwas 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. Other major books by Arnheim have included Visual Thinking, and The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts. Art and Visual Perception was revised, enlarged...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionArtist
Date of Birth15 July 1904
CountryGermany
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.
The fundamental peculiarity of the photographic medium; the physical objects themselves print their image by means of the optical and chemical action of light.
The ambition of instantaneous photography... was that of preserving the spontaneity of action and avoiding any indication that the presence of the picture taker had a modifying influence on what was going on.
Form is sometimes considered a mere spice added by the artist to the representation of objects in order to make it pleasurable.
Every act is a visual judgement.
Now equilibrium is the very opposite of disorder.
When a system is considered in two different states, the difference in volume or in any other property, between the two states, depends solely upon those states themselves and not upon the manner in which the system may pass from one state to the other.
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.
Now the work of art also represents a state of final equilibrium, of accomplished order and maximum relative entropy, and there are those who resent it. But art is not meant to stop the stream of life. Within a narrow span of duration and space the work of art concentrates a view of the human condition; and sometimes it marks the steps of progression, just as a man climbing the dark stairs of a medieval tower assures himself by the changing sights glimpsed through its narrow windows that he is getting somewhere after all.
Good art theory must smell of the studio, although its language should differ from the household talk of painters and sculptors.
Variety is more than a means of avoiding boredom, since art is more than an entertainment of the senses.
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.
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.
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.