[spectre] Rudolf Arnheim dies peacefully

[Andreas Broeckmann]

Margaret Nettinga (Arnheim's daughter) writes:

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. (...)

read more at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Arnheim