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Rudolf Amheim: the Little Owl on the Shoulder of Athene University of Northern Iowa UNI ScholarWorks Faculty Publications Faculty Work 1998 Rudolf Amheim: The Little Owl on the Shoulder of Athene Roy R. Behrens University of Northern Iowa Let us know how access to this document benefits ouy Copyright ©1998 The MIT Press Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.uni.edu/art_facpub Part of the Art and Design Commons Recommended Citation Behrens, Roy R., "Rudolf Amheim: The Little Owl on the Shoulder of Athene" (1998). Faculty Publications. 8. https://scholarworks.uni.edu/art_facpub/8 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Work at UNI ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of UNI ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INVITED REVIEW Rudolf Amheim: The Little Owl on the Shoulder of Athene Roy R. Behrens ABSTRACT The author discusses the life of Rudolf Arnheim (b. 1904), the celebrated art-theorist and psy- chologist, professor emeritus of the psychology of art at Harvard My life has been one of contemplation rather than action; and to move in motion pictures. University and author of 15 books since I watch artists, who are contemplators, I am twice-re- Their work was interrupted by about perceptual psychology in re- lation to art, architecture and film, moved from active life "perche guardo quelli che guardano" World War I, but the gestalt psy- among them Film as Art, Art and [because I observe the observers]. I am, I told the interviewer, chologists were reunited in 1920, Visual Perception, Visual Thinking the little owl perched on the shoulder of Athene ... when Kohler became Director of and The Power of the Center. The the Psychological Institute at the article is a biographical overview -Rudolf Arnheim [1] University of Berlin, where of Arnheim's life and work, includ- ing his association with the gestalt Wertheimer was already teaching. In 1918, a 14-year-old Rudolf Arnheim was lying in bed at psychologists in Berlin in the While remaining in contact with night in his parents' home in Berlin when a bullet crashed 1920s, his pioneering work as a Koffka (who continued to teach film critic, his flight from Nazi Ger- through the window. In advance of the armistice, the German near Frankfurt), and joined at many and his subsequent immigra- Kaiser had abdicated, and there was fighting in the streets as tion to the United States in 1940. the Institute by Kurt Lewin, a various factions battled for control of the government. Domi- German social psychologist, they nating the struggle were the Social Democrats, who, in the established a graduate program following year, established the Weimar Republic. Today, and began a research journal called Psychologische Forschung nearly 80 years later, the distinguished psychologist and art (Psychological Research) [5]. theorist lives in retirement in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he The Psychological Institute was a half-mile from the univer- still has on his writing desk the bullet that came through the sity in, of all places, two floors of the Imperial Palace, which window that night [2]. had stood empty since the Kaiser's overthrow in 1918. The Arnheim was born in Berlin in 1904, the same year as Sal- resulting makeshift laboratories were "very picturesque," vador Dali, Vladimir Horowitz and Deng Xiao-ping. It was the Arnheim recalls, "with angels painted on the ceiling, and the year that Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Martin House in marble bathtubs of the court ladies standing in these rooms, Buffalo, New York; Paul Cezanne painted Mont Sainte Victoire; and that's where we did our experiments. What was so good and Henry James wrote The Golden Bowl. Coincidentally, be- about that psychology department was that it was a real work- cause he would later write the pioneering book Film as Art, it shop .... All of us students served as subjects for our neigh- was also the year of the opening of the first formal motion- bors, and they, in turn, were subjects for our experiments, picture theater, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania [3]. and so you sat there and didn't go much to lectures. It was His father, Georg Arnheim, was a Berlin businessman who learning by workshop" [6]. owned a small piano factory, which he had planned for his Life in Germany during the Weimar Republic, which began son to take over. But the young Arnheim was determined to in 1919 and ended when the Nazis took control in 1933, was enter the university, and when he graduated from secondary both exhilarating and precarious. It was an era of political school, his father agreed to allow him to spend half the week and economic upheaval: "Anything that can be wrong with a at the university, half at the office. "And as you can predict I society was wrong," Arnheim remembers, and "anything that went more and more to the university and less and less to the could be right with a society was right" [7]. But there were office," he recalls. "My father finally gave in, and so I started also astounding opportunities: he remembers attending per- on my career at the university" [4]. formances of the provocative plays of Bertolt Brecht, seeing At the University of Berlin, Arnheim's primary interest was the first exhibitions of German Expressionist art and inter- in psychology, which was regarded at the time as a branch of viewing the Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein. He also philosophy. So he ended up with majors in two subjects, psy- bought for 50 cents first-edition copies of Sigmund Freud's chology and philosophy, and two minors, in the histories of books, which he still has. art and music. Among the distinguished faculty there were It was also the time of the Bauhaus, possibly the most influ- some of the century's finest physicists, including Albert ential European art school of the century, which had opened Einstein and Max Planck, and, in the area of psychology, two in Weimar in 1919, then moved to Dessau in 1927, where it of the founders of gestalt psychology, Max Wertheimer and was housed in the now-famous buildings designed by Walter Wolfgang Kohler. Wertheimer and Kohler had initially met in 1910 in Frank- furt am Main, where, in collaboration with Kurt Koffka, a fel- Roy R. Behrens (artist, writer, teacher), 2022 X Avenue, Dysart, IA 52224-9767, U.S.A. low psychologist, they had investigated "apparent move- E-mail: <[email protected]>. ment," the optical illusion that enables a still image to appear ? 1998 ISAST LEONARDO, Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 231-233, 1998 231 Gropius. Arnheim visited the Dessau the New School for Social Research, Contending that "all perceiving is also Bauhaus one weekend in 1928, when, Koffka at Smith College, Kohler atthinking, all reasoning is also intuition, after receiving his doctorate from the Swarthmore, and Lewin at the University all observation is also invention" [14], he university, he worked for magazines as aof Iowa. In 1943, Arnheim himself be- attacked the established assumptions film critic and cultural affairs editor. An came a psychology professor at Sarah that words, not images, are the primary article he wrote about his Bauhaus visit Lawrence College, while also a visiting ingredients of thinking, and that lan- was published in Die Weltbiihne, a liberal lecturer on the graduate faculty at the guage precedes perception. Rather, political weekly whose editor, Carl Newvon School. Arnheim argued, "the remarkable Ossietzky, was later awarded the Nobel Shortly after arriving in the U.S., mechanisms by which the senses under- Peace Prize while dying from his earlier Arnheim applied for and was granted stand the environment are all but identi- mistreatment in a Nazi concentration two major awards. One was a fellowship cal with the operations described by the camp [8]. from the Rockefeller Foundation, in psychology of thinking" [15]. Like scien- When the Nazis came to power in which he worked with the Office of Ra- tific discovery, he wrote, artistic expres- 1933, one of their earliest ominous acts dio Research at Columbia University sionin "is a form of reasoning, in which was the dismissal ofJewish university pro- analyzing soap-operas and their effects perceiving and thinking are indivisibly fessors, from Nobel Prize-winning scien- on American radio-audiences. The sec- intertwined. A person who paints, writes, tists to graduate assistants. Arnheim's an- ond was a Guggenheim Fellowship, composes,re- dances, I felt compelled to cestry is Jewish, and the sale of his ceived in 1942, to study the role of per-say, thinks with his senses" [16]. ground-breaking book about film, pub- ception in art. For the latter, he In 1968, when Harvard University es- lished only months earlier, was no longer proposed to write a book about the tablished ap- the Department of Visual and permitted. Like scores of other intellec- plication of gestalt theory to the visual Environmental Studies, Arnheim was in- tuals, he had little choice but to flee his arts from the viewpoint of a psychologist vited tojoin its faculty as Professor of the homeland, in his case moving on to and art-theorist. But the project was Psychologypre- of Art. He remained in Cam- Rome, where he continued to write mature, and he delayed it in favor of fur-bridge for 6 years, then retired in 1974 about film for the next 6 years, in asso- ther research. He became convinced, toas Ann Arbor (his wife, n6e Mary Frame, ciation with the League of Nations. He he later explained, that "the tools avail- had been raised near Detroit), where he also wrote a second book, an early study able in the psychology of perception taught at for 10 more years as a Visiting of radio [9].
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