2 Quotes & Sayings By Hildegard Knef

Hildegard Knef was born in 1929 in Germany. She studied music and painting from an early age, and from 1947–1952 she was a student at the Cologne School of Art. In 1950–1951 she spent a year in Paris, where she discovered the work of Picasso and other modern artists. Upon her return to Cologne, Knef began to study psychology and in 1954 received a doctorate in art psychology Read more

Her doctoral thesis was entitled "Applied Psychopathology Using Art" and was accepted at the University of Munich, but it was deemed too controversial for publication. In 1957 Knef became a professor of art psychology at the University of Mainz. In 1962 she became a full professor at the University of Frankfurt, where she taught until her retirement from teaching in 1996.

In 1982 she became a guest lecturer at the Yale School of Art. Currently, Knef is an honorary professor at Hamburg University for Psychology and a visiting professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. She is founder and president of the Hildegard Knef Foundation for Research on Art Therapy, which operates under the auspices of the International Society for Psychotherapy Research (ISPR).