Richard Wollheim
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Richard Arthur Wollheim (5 May 1923 – 4 November 2003) was a British philosopher.
The son of an actress and a theatre director, he attended Westminster School and then Balliol College, Oxford. In 1949 he began to teach philosophy at University College London, where he was Grote Professor of Mind and Logic from 1963 to 1982. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1967 to 1968. He worked at Columbia University until 1985, before moving to the University of California, Berkeley, where he was Chairman of the Department of Philosophy from 1998 to 2002. After retiring, he served briefly as a guest lecturer at Balliol College.
Wollheim was particularly well known for his philosophical discussion of Sigmund Freud. His Art and its Objects was one of the twentieth century's most influential texts on aesthetics. In a 1965 essay, Minimal Art, he even coined the term 'minimalism'.
He was famous also for his habit of staring at a single work of art for three hours or more: he would say that 'it is not until three hours that the work begins to open itself up and reveal its meaning'.
