Pencil Sharpener Poster | Tyler Hillis

Exhibition poster © Tyler Hillis (2015)

Above Poster by graphic designer Tyler Hillis for an exhibition of student posters about historic pencil sharpeners from the P.D. Whitson Collection. Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa.

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Rudolf Arnheim, in a letter to Roy R. Behrens, 1993—

The physicist George Gamow was also an entertaining popularizer. He once told me a story of how with his wife and their baby daughter he visited the Leaning Tower of Pisa. As they climbed the steps, they noticed an increasingly musty smell, which they first attributed to the ancient walls of the building. Then, however, they began to suspect their little girl, and by the time they reached the top it was clear that she needed immediate attention. "And from the very place," explained Gamow, raising his arm and his voice dramatically, "where Galileo launched his experimental objects we also propelled…"  

Oskar Kokoschka Not OK

From Rudolf Arnheim, Parables of Sun Light: Observations on Psychology, the Arts, and the Rest. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, p. 346—

The initials "OK" were the signature of [Austrian expressionist artist] Oskar Kokoschka. Every time I use the two letters to mark my approval of one of my editor's changes on the galleys of my next book, I sneakily credit myself with the small creative act of impersonating one of my favorite painters.

Rudolf Arnheim Remembers His School Days

Gestalt psychologist and art theorist Rudolf Arnheim, author of Art and Visual Perception (and numerous other books), recalling his days as a student in Berlin, in a letter to the author of this blog on December 7, 1997—

It must be quite an experience to meet again with one's old teachers. My own are stored in my memory, where they stay unresponsive to what I do today, but sharply remembered. With the college teacher in literature I had a covenant: you let me read under the table on my lap whatever I want, and I will leave you without my barbs. I got through college mostly through the generosity of my teachers. I had never attended gymnastics, for example, but when we had a graduation party with the teachers, the gym teacher remained after the others had gone, had some more to drink and accompanied himself on the guitar, singing some off-color songs. Then sitting on the couch with a few of us in an by then advanced stage of drink, he looked at me in sudden recognition, put his arm around my shoulder and said, "Arnheim, you black pig [Arnheim, du schwarzes Schwein], you never came to class, but you are a good boy anyway!" I got through the final year's exam mostly because I had directed and played the main part in two performances at the school auditorium, Aristophanes's The Frogs where I played, if I remember correctly, Socrates, and a German comedy by Grabbe, where I played the devil.