Rudolf Arnheim Quotes
Order is a necessary condition for anything the human mind is to understand.
Arnheim, Rudolf. Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order. University of California Press, 1971, p. 1.
The import of this proverb that eventually things get so bad that people take radical steps to organize things. Unfortunately, historically when there have been periods of disorder and anarchy, a strongman or dictator usually takes over and provides the organization,
Fascists organized their political parties as paramilitary organizations.
Rudolf Arnheim was 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 (1954). Other major books by Arnheim have included Visual Thinking (1969), and The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts (1982). Art and Visual Perception was revised, enlarged and published as a new version in 1974, and it has been translated into fourteen languages. He lived in Germany, Italy, England, and America where he taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Harvard University, and the University of Michigan. He has greatly influenced art history and psychology in America.
