The author discusses the life of Rudolf Arnheim (b. 1904), the celebrated art-theorist and psychologist, professor emeritus of the psychology of art at Harvard University and author of 15 books about perceptual psychology in relation to art, architecture and film, among them Film as Art, Art and Visual Perception, Visual Thinking and The Power of the Center. The article is a biographical overview of Arnheim\u27s life and work, including his association with the gestalt psychologists in Berlin in the 1920s, his pioneering work as a film critic, his flight from Nazi Germany and his subsequent immigration to the United States in 1940