Richard Woodfield, 'Gombrich's Story of Art' more

GOMBRICH'S STORY OF ART* Richard Woodfield THIS JOURNAL did not exist when Gombrich first published The Story of Art (1950). I do not know what sort of reception it would have been given then, but it is true to say that it has since attracted a number of critical commonplaces which deserve to be re-examined. It has also never entered into the philosophical arena in the terms which it should have done. This review article is an attempt to redress that situation. A starting point could be the well-worn idea that Gombrich conceives of art's ambition to be illusion or, better, that the Whole History of Art may be matched against an illusionist ideal. The obvious response to this is that the history of architecture, which features in The Story of Art, can hardly have had such an ambition. It might also be recognized that the German Kunst includes architecture, but that English typical usage is 'The Art and Architecture of France'. So why is the history of architecture included in The Story of Art? presumably because it stems from a German way of thinking about the subject. At this point we may recognize that 'Art' is not only a word of the English language, but is also a culturally relative category: the extension of the term 'Art' is not co-extensive with that of socalled translatable terms in other languages. In a Daily Telegraph interview, Russell Davies asked Gombrich 'if he considered that the British had a strong visual sense. His answer, characteristically, found a way to be both kindly and surprising. "They must have, because gardening is their great art. It is immensely widely spread, the interest in gardening and flowers. It is the most living art in this country, I think, and has been for a long time"' (22 April 1995). Why does gardening not feature in The Story of Art, as it might have done in the eighteenth century? paradoxically, because it is no longer regarded as an 'Art' by the English-reading community. Not only is the term 'Art' culturally and linguistically relative, but it is historically relative as well. The reader might have noticed my deployment of the term 'relative' and, possibly being familiar with Gombrich's aversion to the doctrine of absolute relativism, wonder how The Story of Art can handle notions of artistic value. The answer is given in the very first sentence of The Story of Art: 'There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists.' In a recent talk at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Gombrich declared that this opening sentence * In September 1995, Phaidon Press of London published the sixteenth edition (revised, expanded and redesigned) of E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art. The book had first been published in 1950. 'Postscript 1965' was added to the 1966 edition; 'Supplement: new discoveries' was added to the 1984 edition. These two editions were incorporated, with a discussion of the postmodern scenario 'An altered mood', as an additional chapter 'A story without end' in the 1989 edition. Through the course of its many editions, Phaidon has improved the quality of plates and production of the volume. This edition adds a very small number of artists, increases the number of plates and returns to the original format of plates proximate to discussion; it is a testimony to the growing quality and sophistication of the art book industry. Its only drawback, now, is its weight, thereby giving support to Goethe's observation that every advance also has a consequential loss, one of the central themes of The Story of Art itself. * Richard Woodfield Gombrich s Stories of Art also implies the theoretical position that underlies the whole book. Briefly, I propose to go back to earlier usage, to the time when the word 'Art' signified any skill or mastery as it does when we speak of the 'Art of War', or the 'Art of Love', or as Whistler did in 'The gentle art of making enemies'. This good old usage was replaced in the Romantic Period by the one that is still in current use according to which the word Art stands for a special faculty of a human mind to be classified with religion and science. It is an interesting shift in meaning but it cannot concern me here. Suffice it to say that when you replace the word 'Art' by the word 'Skill' in the opening sentence, it ceases to look challenging or paradoxical. There can be no skill in the abstract, skill is always for something and the skill with which this book is concerned is mainly that of image making. (22 September 1995, courtesy E. H. Gombrich.) Note that Gombrich says that The Story of Art is concerned with 'image making' and not 'the production of the illusionist image'. A major idea behind the book is that at different times of history and in different cultures, image-making has played different roles. Different periods and cultures offered the visual artist different tasks. Artists working in Western Europe inherited a project which was born in classical antiquity. That project, as others do, has a history which is traceable. As Heinrich Schafer pointed out in Von ägyptischer Kunst (1919), the Greeks introduced the revolution of producing figurative imagery on the eye-witness principle: what could be seen by a stationary spectator from a fixed point. Even so Greek art was not, as Plato said, a mirror to nature; there was more concern with the variety of nature in an Egyptian image than a Greek one. Medieval artists had a different concern, with a form of pictography rather than eyewitness depiction, which nevertheless contained remnants of the ancients visual discoveries. The urge for 'the artist to "paint what he saw" dawned only during the Renaissance' (p. 561). Other artists, working within other traditions, had different ambitions, and took their image-making activities to different levels of refinement. A major alternative tradition was the Chinese, against which others, such as Assyrian, pre-Columbian or sub-Saharan, hardly match. In a recent contribution to this journal, I discussed Gombrich's earlier critique of historians who assumed an 'unhistorical aestheticism' based on an assumption of unity of artistic purposes ('Gombrich, Formalism and the Description of Works of Art' British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 34, 1994). In the 1965 Postscript to The Story of Art he reiterated the point. In its conclusion he said that the inclusion of a wide variety of different artefacts from different cultures and periods in museums leads to the belief that `all this is Art with a capital A though dating from different periods' and commented 'the history of art only begins to make sense when we see why it is not; and why painters and sculptors responded to different situations, institutions and fashions in different ways' (p. 618). So what Gombrich is doing is to tell us about our artistic tradition and how we emerged from it. An interesting question is: how is it ours? The key to The Story of Art is the role that tradition has had to play within the historical development of our culture. To define a culture in terms of its most recent products would be to tear the centre out of its existence. In the same way that a language offers a resource for endless creativity and carries 'lumps' of practice bedded into it, so do the other arts. Shakespeare's Hamlet is a linguistic resource within the resource of language itself and Poussin's paintings are a resource within the greater resource of visual imagery. As writers of the eighteenth century developed complex narrative skills which led to the triumphs of the French novel in the nineteenth century (see V. Milne, The Eighteenth-Century French Richard Woodfield Gombrich s Stories of Art Novel: Techniques of Illusion, Manchester, 1965), visual artists of the Italian renaissance developed technical skills which were refined by artists of later generations. But linguistic complexity does not, of itself, produce a fine novel or poem and visual, technical skills do not, of themselves, generate works of art. After all, one point linear perspective simply offers a schema to handle size relationships in space and an understanding of the workings of occlusion. Raphael did not simply create The School of Athens from his knowledge of perspective and Michaelangelo's Last Judgement displays more than a good working knowledge of anatomy; it is the visual 'poetry' which makes them both works of art. The nineteenth century witnessed the end of an engagement with a living tradition of artistic achievement dating back to the Italian renaissance. A search for new standards emerged. Contrary to popular belief Gombrich is not hostile to twentieth-century art per se, though he is definitely unsympathetic to much of it. His concern is more with the doctrines which have led it to develop in the ways in which it has, and particularly the ways in which art has become captured by ideologists. A central question today is not whether a work of art is good but whether it is on the side of progress, even in a period which claims to have disposed of master narratives. Few people, particularly ideological commentators, seem to have given much serious thought to the 1965 Postscript to The Story of Art (now pp. 612-18). Gombrich pointed to the significance of the ideas that one should be of one's time, that we are all riding on the tide of historical progress and that we should deny the value and continued relevance of what has been achieved in the past. Taken to their logical conclusion they result in barbarism, an example being Ceaucescu's forced transformation of Rumania by eviction and bulldozer. What many of modernism's supporters forget is that the past continues to have a valued present. Indeed a number of modernist practitioners actively conducted raids into past art to provide motifs for their own; Der Blaue Reiter and Picasso offer cases in point. Its supporters, however, have treated the visual arts as a polarizing issue to contrast the enlightened with the benighted: the former must reject the past and the latter's enthusiasm for Rembrandt, Beethoven and Dostoevsky marks them as unregenerately behind the times. It does not seem to strike anyone that this is an unintelligent attitude to take. And because Gombrich maintains that one cannot have achievement without the refinement and development of skills, i.e. tradition, he is branded a conservative. At this point it would be useful to extend his institutional analysis of artistic practice to the teaching of art history. If art history departments once used to serve the interests of curators and connoisseurs, they have now become a target for political activists. The great artistic achievements of the past have been labelled High Art and dismissed as having traditionally served the interests of the dominant classes. Judgements of value are now simply seen as reflecting ideological interest. Our culture, as a source of value, has been replaced by a value free system of cultures to be studied as a sociologist would study any other form of consumer behaviour. In an essay 'Art History and the Social Sciences' (reprinted in Ideals and Idols, Oxford, 1979) Gombrich made the point that 'the sociologist can always tell us which are the top ten; he cannot commit himself to picking a first eleven. The top ten, as we know, are based on real or pretended statistics of sale; the choice of a first eleven is a matter of past performance and of faith' (p. 155). Although facts may assist in making value judgements, the value judgements themselves remain unprovable. One cannot prove that Raphael was a better artist than Botticelli, even on Gombrich's account of technical development because, as he often says, an achievement in one direction is often accomplished with a loss in another. Nevertheless, they both deserve a place in a first eleven. If one had no faith in one's own first eleven, one would be lost. Richard Woodfield Gombrich s Stories of Art Great art offers a better filter through which I might understand myself and others (the central tenet of Bildung) than anything else. Engels actually addressed this problem in a letter to Margaret Harkness when he described Balzac's Comédie Humaine as more revealing about the state of French society than any tendentious literature, despite the fact that he was a legitimist (Maynard Solomon, Marxism and Art, Brighton, 1979, pp. 67-9). And Walter Benjamin, another product of Bildung, rated quality of artistic performance more highly than political correctness ('The Author as Producer', in Understanding Brecht, London, 1977). Ideologues who teach 'minority cultures' are usually those who have been trained in the major leagues. Our own European cultures (in the plural) would not have their distinctive physiognomies without their masterpieces. The qualitative characteristics of a culture are not measurable, but that is not to say that they are not there. Interests, enjoyments and desires are better satisfied in some places rather than others. British patrons of the eighteenth century recognized this when they imported their art, painters and composers from France and Italy and exported their sons on the Grand Tour. They knew what they wanted their world to be and acted on it, to the extent of employing architects and landscape gardeners to transform their living environments. Valued features of an environment may be discoverably there. I once had a self-professed working class student who took some very boring photographs of her own immediate locale. When she was challenged by the staff to make more interesting pictures, she replied that she was not interested in producing picturesque photographs for her middle class tutors because her environment was boring. She obviously shared her tutors' view of her own environment; so much for the relativity of values. Although one may not be able to justify a value system, at least within that system one may indicate the things which give it its value. This does not result in a canonical first eleven, but at least some debate over what might be in it. There is no debate over the point of its being there. As Gombrich himself has often remarked, the book was born out of a particular intellectual milieu: the pursuit of Bildung, which was the secular religion of German speakers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In his own Viennese home, it was believed that it was important to have a commitment to nature and art, which were 'needs of the mind' (see 'Nature and Art as Needs of the Mind', in Tributes, Oxford, 1984). Leaving nature to one side, Art consisted of whatever was great and good in the history of culture, the classics of music, literature and the visual arts. This included world art to the extent that Gombrich's nursery stories included tales from the Mahabarata. He was brought up on a diet of good books, from Homer through Shakespeare and Goethe to Dostoevsky and Ibsen, and music in the classical German tradition. He was also encouraged to explore the city's museums, which he did with great enthusiasm. The Austrian Museum of Arts and Crafts played a similar role to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and contained a vast range of artefacts from across the world including 'one of the richest collections of oriental rugs anywhere in the world' (E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order, Oxford, 1979, p. 180). Its wide range of paintings and drawings contained a significant volume of work from the Middle Ages and the Northern European schools, echoing the interests of its founder Rudolph Eitelberger von Edelberg. It is not surprising, to me at least, that Bildung should have bred the great anthropologists and philologists of the nineteenth century. Neither does it surprise me that Gombrich, with his friend Kurz, should have studied Chinese when leaving university or that his son is now Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford University. Freud and Marx, as well, were brought up in the tradition of Bildung. For Freud, psychoanalysis had nothing to say about what made Art with a capital 'A' and had little relevance to Richard Woodfield Gombrich s Stories of Art the practice of Art (see E. H. Gombrich, `Freud's Aesthetics', in Richard Woodfield (ed.), Reflections on the History of Art, Oxford, 1987). And for Marx, 'the difficulty ... (of) Greek art and epos ... lies in understanding why they still constitute for us a source of aesthetic enjoyment and in certain respects still prevail as the standard and model beyond attainment' (Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, quoted in Solomon, p. 62). As Gombrich himself said, 'it is wholly understandable that it has ... become usual to explain and if possible to excuse Freud's rejection of modern art by pointing to the prejudices of his generation and of his milieu.' But as he went on to say, 'it is always somewhat risky to dispose of the views of a great man which we find uncomfortable ... We may be quite sure that he had theoretical reasons for his attitude' (`Verbal Wit as a Paradigm of Art', in Tributes, p. 103). Gombrich's own discomfort with modem art was born out of its advocates claims and what he sees as its tendencies to regression. I must confess that I share his preference for Beethoven over the latest experiments in atonalism or post-modem pastiche, and give me Rembrandt, Degas and the best Persian carpets any day. There is no need to be exclusive, however. But there is an important difference between knowing one's Rembrandt and knowing about Rembrandt: therein lies the difference between Bildung and the academy.