[rohrpost] Rudolf Arnheim 1904 bis 2007

[Oliver Grau]

Rudolf Arnheims lebenslange Besch*ftigung mit den Bildmedien 
reichte von der Einf*hrung des Tonfilms bis zu seiner 2000 verfassten 
Forderung, die interaktive Medienkunst in den Bildschatz der Kunst- 
und Bildgeschichte zu integrieren.  siehe: www.MediaArtHistories.org 
  
Lebensdaten Rudolf Arnheims verfasst von seiner Tochter 
Margaret Nettinga 
  
Rudolf Arnheim, a pathbreaking psychologist of visual experience in 
the arts, died at the age of 102 in Ann Arbor, Michigan on June 9 
2007. 
                                                     
His last academic post was at the University of Michigan, where he was 
Visiting Professor in the Departments of Art, History of 
Art, and Psychology from 1974 to 1984. The previous American years of 
his long academic career were spent at Sarah Lawrence College from 
1943 to 1968 and at Harvard in the Department of Visual and 
Enviromental Studies from 1968 to 1974. 
                                                                             
Born in Berlin in 1904, where his father was a manufacturer of pianos, 
Rudof Arnheim took his doctorate at the University of Berlin in 1928, 
with a dissertation of the experimental psychology of visual 
expression, and secundary studies in musicology and history of art. 
At the time Arnheim was enrolled in Berlin University's Institute of 
Psychology, it was the center of experimentation in Gestalt 
Psychology, with Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang K*hler, and Kurt Lewin the 
central authorities. 
                                                                                                             
Arnheim conducted some of the earliest experiments in the application 
of Gestalt theory in the perception of a work of art. Between 1928 and 
his departure from Nazi Germany in 1933, he was on the editorial staff 
of Die Weltb*hne, the influential weekly magazine then edited by Carl 
von Ossietzky and suppressed with the advent of the Third Reich.  It 
was in this publication that Arnheim ventured into film criticism, a 
medium that became central to his theories of vision. Between 1933 and