It would be most wholesome if for at least twenty years art historians were forbidden to refer to any derivations. If they were not allowed to account for a work of art mainly by tracing where it comes from, they would have to deal with it in and by itself – which is what they are most needed for.

— Rudolf Arnheim

Rudolf Arnheim Quotes

No mature style of art in any culture has ever been simple. In certain cultures, an overall symmetry may conceal the complexity of the work at first glance.

— Rudolf Arnheim

A revolution must aim at the destruction of the given order and will succeed only by asserting an order of its own.

— Rudolf Arnheim

Just as a chemist “isolates” a substance from contaminations that distort his view of its nature and effects, so the work of art purifies significant appearance. It presents abstract themes in their generality, but not reduced to diagrams.

— Rudolf Arnheim

The fundamental peculiarity of the photographic medium; the physical objects themselves print their image by means of the optical and chemical action of light.

— Rudolf Arnheim

A cloud can look like a camel, but a camel is unlikely to look like a cloud. This is so because the signifier must be able to stand for the whole category of the signified. The cloud looks like all camels, but no camel looks like all clouds.

— Rudolf Arnheim

A good documentary or educational film is not raw experience. The material has passed the mill of reason, it has been sifted and interpreted.

— Rudolf Arnheim

Every act is a visual judgement.

— Rudolf Arnheim

Form is sometimes considered a mere spice added by the artist to the representation of objects in order to make it pleasurable.

— Rudolf Arnheim

Order is a necessary condition for making a structure function. A physical mechanism, be it a team of laborers, the body of an animal, or a machine, can work only if it is in physical order.

— Rudolf Arnheim

The principle of parsimony is valid esthetically in that the artist must not go beyond what is needed for his purpose.

— Rudolf Arnheim

The clarification of visual forms and their organization in integrated patterns as well as the attribution of such forms to suitable objects is one of the most effective training grounds of the young mind.

— Rudolf Arnheim

Order is a prerequisite of survival; therefore the impulse to produce orderly arrangements is inbred by evolution.

— Rudolf Arnheim

Would there be any truth in saying that psychology was created by the sophists to sow distrust between man and his world?

— Rudolf Arnheim

Some popular quotations smell of airless closets. They exhale the stale imagination of the intellectual lower middle class. “Suspension of disbelief” has become one of them. Dressed up as a scintillating double negation, it serves the pedestrian notion of art as illusion.

— Rudolf Arnheim

It would be most wholesome if for at least twenty years art historians were forbidden to refer to any derivations. If they were not allowed to account for a work of art mainly by tracing where it comes from, they would have to deal with it in and by itself – which is what they are most needed for.

— Rudolf Arnheim

Since mechanically obtained randomness contains all kinds of possible permutations, including the most regular ones, it cannot be relied upon always to exhibit a pervasive irregularity.

— Rudolf Arnheim

Every great artist gives birth to a new universe, in which the familiar things look the way they have never before looked to anyone.

— Rudolf Arnheim

The mere exposure to masterworks does not suffice. Too many persons visit museums and collect picture books without ever gaining access to art. The inborn capacity to understand through the eyes has been put to sleep and must be reawakened. This is best accomplished by handling pencils, brushes, chisels and perhaps cameras.

— Rudolf Arnheim

Our experiences and ideas tend to be common but not deep, or deep but not common.

— Rudolf Arnheim

Both art and science are bent on the understanding of the forces that shape existence, and both call for a dedication to what is. Neither of them can tolerate capricious subjectivity because both are subject to their criteria of truth. Both require precision, order, and discipline because no comprehensible statement can be made without these. Both accept the sensory world as what the Middle Ages called signatura regrum, the signature of things, but in quite different ways.

— Rudolf Arnheim
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