Richard Woodfield: Ernst Gombrich and the problem of being a Viennese art historian in London more

Art History and the Diaspora: Ernst Gombrich and the problem of being a Viennese art historian in London Notes and sources Richard Woodfield Presentational style: When the Secretary kindly invited me to give this year’s annual lecture, I replied that I could only accept this honour if I was not expected to give a formal address, but rather discuss certain problems in an informal way. It was not only laziness which prompted me here. I have become increasingly sceptical of the value of that survival of epideictic oratory called “the formal lecture”. I was all the more happy to see, that this scepticism is shared by the supreme master of the genre, Lord Clark, who really said all there is to be said on this topic in his splendid self-portrait. “Historical truth,” he says, “is usually complex and frequently dull, and anyone with a sense of style or a love of language is tempted to take short-cuts and omit the qualifications that would make a statement less telling”. “The lecture form” he remarks, “encouraged all the evasions and half-truths that I had learned to practice in my weekly essays at Oxford”. With this damning accusation in mind I suggest that this Society should spawn a Society for the Reform of Lecturing with a radical wing agitating for its total abolition. I would at least plead for the abolition of lectures which are subsequently to be published. I believe that what is most suitable for discussion in front of an audience are precisely those half baked ideas and arguments which are not yet ripe to be printed. Which at last brings me to the ideas or worries I should like to air here tonight. Source: Ernst Gombrich,’Topos and Topicality’, Annual Lecture of the Society for Renaissance Studies, delivered at University College, London, 10 January, 1975. Gombrich Archive. The paradox: The paradox was well-expressed by Willibald Sauerländer, who said that his friend’s ‘position in the field of “official” art history was at once dominant and peripheral.’ Source: E. H. Gombrich: A Commemoration, London: Warburg Institute, 2002, p. 18. Eisler’s American perspective on Gombrich (1969): Although far fewer jobs were available in England than America, with fierce competition for the minuscule number of appointments in a country which still scarcely recognizes art history in its oldest universities, those German and Austrian refugees who succeeded in establishing themselves in the face of almost insuperable odds have, it must be said, had more impact on the intellectual climate of Britain than have their, on the average, far more affluent émigré colleagues in America. One cannot point to an art historian-refugee or native American whose influential role in the country in the teaching of his subject parallels the creative, authoritative position of Ernst Gombrich in England. This may well be due to a purely individual breadth of interest and sympathy and to Gombrich's concern with psychoanalysis and philosophy (reflecting his Austrian origins and the Wiener Schule), going far beyond the bounds of conventional art history and netting a rich catch. Odd as it may sound, speculation is decidedly not in style on the American campus, and Gombrich's brilliance, his modest audacity, his almost limitless scope would not, thank goodness, have "fitted in" with the makeup of any Fine Arts Department in this country. Significantly, few adherents of the Wiener Schule came to America, where their complex approach, combining knowledge of art history, psychology, and often the decorative arts would have been far less at home in the campuses or museums than even the Warburgians. Those who did come, Berliner, Kris, Schwarz, the Tietzes, De Tolnay—excepting the latter—were primarily involved in museum work. Prior to their arrival and that of Rudolf Arnheim, some interest in psychoanalysis had been evinced by American art historians such as Meyer Schapiro, and the subject had received wide attention through such publications as Herbert Read's Art and Society (1937). That unclassifiable masterpiece, Adams' Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres, already showed receptivity to psychology. Such psychologists and psychiatrists as Viktor Lowenfeld and Kurt Eissler have given extensive consideration to art history and creativity, but these have not been integrated in academic art history. America has shown far less interest in this area than did Germany almost forty years ago, when Pinder was extremely receptive to the new psychological research of the late Kurt Lewin, who like Lowenfeld and Eissler came to the United States. The analytical, symbolically oriented studies initiated by Aby Warburg and entitled iconology sprang from many of the same sources as those of Freudian thought. Warburg's omnivorous interests were often allied to those encompassed by anthropology and sociology, but he never succumbed to Scientism in the expression of his insights and discoveries in the role of ritual and the occult. In America, the impact of European psychoanalytical thought in the realm of art history has been about as silly as that of Freud on the movies. Years ago Hollywood was entranced with schizophrenia and related maladies in the Three Faces of Eve and The Dark Mirror, now more vigorously and originally represented in Warhol's split screen. As far as art history is concerned, apart from Rudolf Arnheim's and Ernst Kris's insights, the Freudian approach has not yet led to valuable American explorations; such studies as the relationship between Cézanne's masturbation and his art do not do much to illuminate either. Freud's own reliability as an interpreter of art has been called into question by Meyer Schapiro in "Two Slips of Leonardo and a Slip of Freud."57 One of the most brilliant Austrian art historians, Ernst Kris, turned completely to psychoanalytical practice and research in America. In his late twenties Kris completed catalogs for objects in precious metals and stone in the Kunsthistorisches Museum that suggested the culmination of a lifetime of advanced, intense, and specialized scholarship. His work on the Rustic Style, published in the Wiener Jahrbuch, remains among the outstanding studies of the century. Some of his concern with art continued in his later American studies, but these are clinical and not historical. A dynamic scholar, from Germany, who became a giant in English art history before repeating that achievement in America, is Rudolf Wittkower, now chairman of the Department of Art and Archaeology at Columbia University. As acknowledged on the B.B.C., Wittkower's innumerable publications did so much "to elucidate British art and architecture to the British."58 57. Psychoanalysis: Journal of Psychoanalytic Psychology, IV (1955-1956), 3-8; "Leonardo and Freud: an Art-Historical Study," Journal of the History of Ideas, 17 (1956), 147-148. 58. Pevsner, "An Un-English Activity?" 716. [The Listener, October 30, 1952, 715-6.] Source: Colin Eisler, ‘Kunstgeschichte American Style’, 608-9, in David Fleming and Bernard Bailyn, The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930-1960, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1969. From Michael Kitson’s review of Meditations on a Hobby Horse: It is also, like Art and Illusion, a more difficult [book] than it looks at first sight. I don’t mean by this that its style is obscure or jargon-ridden, still less that it is hard to read; on the contrary, it is hard to put down. Nor does any great difficulty arise, I think, from the originality of the ideas as such, for these are expressed clearly enough. “Neither communication no expression can function in a void” – “All art is image-making and all image-making is rooted in the creation of substitutes” – “The genre (still life) may often be said to come first, the emotion afterwards.” The text abounds in such epigrams, which can be understood out of context. Yet Professor Gombrich’s meaning can hardly be said to reside in these phrases alone, for they are not “conclusions” to an argument in the ordinary sense but only, so to speak, the outstanding features of an intellectual landscape which, to be appreciated, must be explored in full. Each essay is, moreover, a crossing of the same, or nearly the same, intellectual landscape only from a different point. The result is that the ideas which recur do so under different lights, in different orders, and with varying degrees of emphasis. This is not to say that the nominal topics discussed are no more than pretexts, that they are not genuine problems to which the ideas may be fruitfully applied. But while a great precision and subtlety of thought are achieved by this approach, they are achieved at the cost of making the argument difficult, if not impossible, to paraphrase. In my view this is certainly not a fault. But it does lead one into the curious position of feeling that one has understood Professor Gombrich without being able to produce, in one’s own words, a summary of what he has said. Source: Michael Kitson, ‘Gombrich’s Hobby Horse’, Encounter 22, May 1964, 65-6. Kenneth Clark’s English perspective on Gombrich (1977): Sir Ernst Gombrich has been for many years the head of the Warburg Institute, now fortunately located in London, and most people interested in the subject would agree that he is the most intelligent, the most learned, and the wittiest of English art historians. He is also one of the most prolific. Eight of his volumes stand on my shelves. I have read them all, but owing to my pitiful inability to follow philosophical arguments, I cannot claim that I have always understood them. Fortunately I do not need to write about this aspect of his work since this has been done already by the philosopher Richard Wollheim. ... I hope I have made clear my enormous admiration for Sir Ernst Gombrich's writings, and that I may be allowed to end this review with one criticism, not so much of Gombrich himself as of all Warburgian critics. It seems to me that the chief aim of the art historian is to give the reader some idea of why great artists are great. I know that in the eighteenth century, when various critics allocated marks to painters as if they were examiners, Giulio Romano often came out top of the class. But we all know that, compared to Titian, the industrious Giulio Romano was a second-rate artist. The first duty of criticism is to try to describe why Titian was superior to Giulio Romano. This may be almost impossible, but Berenson, and even Wölfflin (who takes a beating in Norm and Form), tried to do so. Perhaps I am only saying that criticism should be more concerned with values than with symbols, and Gombrich is well aware of that; but sometimes the Warburgian approach seems to obsess him, and is worked out in such great detail that we begin to grow a little impatient. Source: Kenneth Clark, ‘Stories of Art’, New York Review of Books, 24 (19), November 24, 1977. Cecil Gould’s English perspective on Gombrich (1987): Throughout the middle years of the present century two art-historians, the late Lord Clark and Sir Ernst Gombrich, have had the greatest success in interpreting the visual arts. The work of both displays extraordinary insight and has proved lastingly popular. Yet, as a purely personal judgment, I have always found Clark's work easier to read than Gombrich's. This is admittedly partly due to style. Clark was a natural stylist and was writing in his native language, whereas Gombrich has been at a linguistic disadvantage. But I think the distinction, or rather my reaction, goes deeper. In looking at works of art Kenneth Clark, a Scotsman brought up in England, started with the visual aspect - the relation of form and colour which appealed, or failed to appeal, to his eye - and then allowed his mind to consider it. Gombrich, on the other hand, who grew up in the heady intellectual atmosphere of Vienna of the 1920s, appears to do the opposite. With him the cerebral element seems to predominate over the visual. ... Immensely well-read and with a very lively and original intelligence, Sir Ernst is able to follow his ideas without violating known facts. In addition- and this is by no means common among very erudite scholars – he shows a lot of common sense. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, his conclusions remain, for the most part, speculative. Has he ever actually established anything that was not known before? I ask the question honestly and perhaps in ignorance. Source: Cecil Gould, review of E. H. Gombrich New Light on Old Masters: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance IV, Apollo, January 1987, 75. Francis Haskell’s English perspective on Gombrich (1992): Dear Mr. Woodfield, Thank you very much for your letter. It has, I am afraid, presented me with an insuperable problem. For more than thirty-five years I have benefited from Ernst Gombrich's help, advice, encouragement, criticism and friendship, and my debt to him both personally and intellectually (for I have also read everything that he has written, as far as I am aware) is enormous. I would always be happy to acknowledge that debt. But I would simply be incapable of writing about his work, as you ask me to do. My own mind does not work at all in that way: indeed, now I think about it, I realise that one of the reasons that I have learnt so much from him is just the fact that although his approach is so totally different from mine I can understand what he is saying, whereas usually in such cases I am baffled: but, alas, this does not mean that I am capable of discussing it adequately, and any contribution I made would be utterly fatuous. I do hope that you will appreciate (and, incidentally, that Ernst also will appreciate if, as you say, he knows about your project, but is surprised by my non-appearance in it) that my declining to accept your invitation in no way implies a reluctance to honour him: on the contrary. One of the lessons I have learnt from him - and it is not quite so simple as one might think - is not to cover up one's ignorance and inability to argue seriously under a protective camouflage of clichés. And that is what I would be forced to do should I take part. I need hardly say that if you are also seeking brief tributes, to indicate the respect and admiration in which he is held, as well as serious pieces, I would be more than happy to participate. Perhaps this letter could serve that very purpose ... Yours sincerely, Francis Haskell Source: personal communication 11 February 1992. Cambridge University Press’s response to a festschrift proposal (1994): Dear Dr Woodfield After some delay, for which I apologize, I am now able to give you Rose Shawe-Taylor's response to the Gombrich project proposal. I'm sorry to report that for several reasons Rose does not feel that this project is really right for us. At 130,000 words plus bibliography and index it is rather long, but the more important objection is that its inter-disciplinary nature tells against it in marketing terms -the range in Gombrich's work has been extremely important for later scholarship, but reflecting this range does not make for a coherent volume which we can direct towards a particular reading public. We would not wish, in any case, to make a commitment on the basis of anything less than the complete typescript in its final form, and I know that the project has not yet reached that stage; there is, therefore, room for some rethinking on this, but I rather fear that the kind of project which you would consider most appropriate for your purposes is not one that we could accommodate in our list. I am sorry to have to disappoint you. Yours sincerely Dr Hilary Gaskin Source: personal communication 28 February 1994. Gombrich’s description of himself (2000): I don’t feel I am English; I feel precisely what I am – a Central European working in England. Thanks to my work with the BBC I learned English thoroughly. Source: Adi Wimmer (ed.), Strangers at Home and Abroad: Recollections of Austrian Jews Who Escaped Hitler, Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland & Company 2000, 135. Gombrich on personal identity: BURKE: In your lecture, you were most preoccupied with one kind of cultural history: as context or background to great books, great works of art. And I would want to say, though I doubt if you'd disagree with this, that there's another kind of cultural history which is also enormously important: the cultural history which deals with popular culture, which deals with what the French call the history of mentalities, with what ordinary people are thinking at a particular period, if this can be recovered. In this area there's rather more value in quantitative methods than if one's trying to work out the iconography of Botticelli. GOMBRICH: I suppose that as far as such mentalities are recoverable or can even be described, you are entirely right, but I never quite know how this should be done. I couldn't really describe the mentality of the people in the street in which I live: this seems to me a very elusive thing. I myself have had to change cultures, as it were, and languages. I have a certain feel for the difference between the atmosphere of the Vienna in which I grew up and the atmosphere of the London in which I live, but when it comes to describing this feel, or pointing to particular instances, I find I'm rather at a loss. The only thing I can say is that what I read about pre-war Vienna always strikes me as wildly wrong, I just don't recognise the city in which I lived. It is a very difficult thing to pin down this atmosphere. These are features one takes for granted. They are part of the background. What methods one should use to bring them into the foreground, and how far one may falsify them by doing so, is one of the problems we are confronting. BURKE: But still, when one reads texts written several centuries ago, one feels a need for some concept like mentality. GOMBRICH: I would not deny that mentality is a useful term, but I think it is also true that people change their mentalities. I'm rather attracted by the sociological concept of roleplaying in this respect. If you get into another group, you may feel that your mentality is changing: let us say, as an extreme example, the Army, or another group where everybody seems to act and to think and to speak in a different way, and this reacts back on your own responses to a rather surprising degree. Language is the best guide to mentality in this way. I don't know if you know the very interesting results of Liam Hudson with schoolboys. In his book Frames of Mind he has shown that boys who consider themselves to be on the science side give dry matter-of-fact answers, which seem to prove that they are quite unimaginative. But if you tell them, 'Imagine that you are a poet and now answer,' they suddenly become very imaginative. The role is not the person, and we are all many persons. Years ago I took part in experiments about the interpretation of facial expressions in news photographs. This turned out to be almost impossible unless you were also given the context: but there was an exception. You easily recognised the expression which was 'put on' to proclaim a public role - as when a Nazi storm-trooper modelled his bearing on his Führer. Membership of such a movement stamps a man much more than, say, membership of a ping-pong club. Source: (with Peter Burke) ‘Ernst Gombrich discusses the concept of cultural history with Peter Burke’, The Listener, 27th December, Vol. 90, 1973, pp.881-883. The Gombrich Archive. Panofsky’s perceptions of England and America (1933-4): [396 Letter to Margaret Barr, New York, Sep 8th 1933] I felt a kind of horror at the thought of living in America for ever, because life is pretty hard over there and somewhat sterile as far as "art and culture" is concerned. Now, thanks to you, I am almost convinced that, in a way, a "déraciné" could find a new home (which means: a feeling of being wanted) in America more easily than in Europe. The other European countries are "adult countries", that is to say they have developed a culture and a scientific method and also (what is most important) a general human attitude which is mature, finished and somehow "closed". They would receive a foreigner with hospitality and even kindness (cf. Focillon), but would not meet him half-way, so to speak: he would have to adapt himself completely to the indigenous culture "encombrée par une tradition" (and I am certainly too old, and probably too "german" for that, in spite of my much-maligned race), unless he would remain an isolated outsider for all his life. America however, is still in a state of mouldable plasticity, not only willing to give but also to take, and I could imagine that a person like me could be more useful to the American students than to the English or the French, and could establish a kind of dynamic relation to other human beings more easily. Maybe I am mistaken because you, dearest Lady Margaret, are no "American" in the normal sense, but rather an exceptional and "optimal" case thanks to your Irish- Italian extraction, to your European-American education and interests and, last not least to your personal and individual qualities. But the very fact that a person like you is possible in America and, in addition the fact that even Alfred seems to think that I could be useful "over there", has impressed me more than I can say. [467 Letter to Margaret Barr, New York, 10.7.1934] ... with all those courses (N.Y.U. having put in a "seminar course", so that I shall have to lecture 8 hours a week), examinations and "consultations with the students". "Extremum hunc, Arethusa, mihi concede laborem"! Still I am really quite glad to go to America instead of to London. The facilities of the Warburg Library, now splendidly installed in the Thames House — all books on one floor and all the shelves accessible to every reader — are, of course, quite magnificent; but the whole thing is filled with what I should like to call an Emigrant's or Refugiée's atmosphere (the readers consisting almost exclusively of German and Hungarian jews), and I don't think that a man like myself could ever become an integral part of the English system of education, as is the case in America. There are two intelligent art=historians in London (both young assistant-keepers at the Brit.<ish> Mus.<eum>), but they have, of course, not much time to work with the Warburg people, and the general attitude of the English towards art is absolutely different from, if not hostile to, the continental one. They consider a work of art either as an object of aesthetic appreciation (collecting, attributing, poetical paraphrasis or ecphrasis) or as a purely historical document (hence the splendid catalogues of manuscripts, f. i., which are traced back to St. Patrick and then followed up through the libraries of 18 - 20 different monasteries), but not as an object of "interpretation". It is a kind of gentlemanly attitude and I have a feeling that they regard our means of approach as an almost obscene thing: you can love a woman or you can establish her family-history, but you can not analyse her mental and physical qualities in public.' Maybe they are right. But I feel, personally, that I have done the right thing in coming to America — even if I should remain tied up with N.Y.U. all my life. After all, my "best friend" lives in New York! The Courtauld Institute is, in point of fact, extremely bad, partly boring, partly dilettante, and Lord Lee one of the most unpleasant characters I ever met. I had an actual row with him, when he looked down upon America as a semi barbarian country, and rather lectured him, I am afraid. He has also a doubtful Raffael to say the least of it. He did not give the money for the Warburg Institute, but only leads the Board of Trustees an(d) raised the money. The greater part came from Courtauld himself, as far as I know. [471 Letter to Charles Rufus Morey, July 20th 1934] Dear Morey, I can hardly express my gratitude for the indefatigable kindness and patience with which you take care of our future life in Princeton, including books, office and even wall-papers. It means a good deal to me to feel received with so much good will, and I don't regret the failure of the London plans. True, the facilities of the Warburg Institute are quite splendid (Saxl and myself have just finished the new edition of our book on Dürer's Melencolia which has turned out to be an actual Burton redivivus), and I am sure that my life in London would have been more leisurely and perhaps more fertile with respect to research, yet I feel that English civilization, and especially the English attitude towards art, has something impermeable about it, so that a foreign scholar would always remain an emigrant instead of becoming an immigrant. The English attitude towards a work of art is a "gentlemanly" one, so to speak. They either conceive it as an object of enjoyment and collecting (including connaisseurship), or as a mere historical monument which must be traced through monasteries down to St. Patrick, but they almost object to scientific analysis and interpretation, as they would object to a man who would analyze the mental and physical qualities of his wife in public, instead of making love to her in private or perhaps writing her family-history. Thus I do feel that the development or rather resurrection of continental methods will take place in America rather than here, and I should be more than happy if I could participate, however modestly, in this process. Source: Erwin Panofsky: Korrepondenz 1910 bis 1968. Eine kommentierte Auswahl in fünf Bänden. Herausgegeben von Dieter Wuttke, Band 1, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2001, 638, 737, 742. Nicolaus Pevsner on speaking to the English: From a letter written to his wife Lola in 1934 Swimming in these waters isn't going to be easy. Each sentence, each lecture, each book, each conversation here means something completely different from what it would mean back home. The words mean something different. The wiring in the brain is different. Source: Stephen Games, Pevsner – The Early Life: Germany and Art, London: Continuum 2010, 202. Richard Krautheimer discussing his arrival in America: From ‘Anstatt eines Vorworts’ in Ausgewählte Aufsätze zur europaischen Kunstgeschichte (Koln 1988) The second day in New York Max Ascoli, anti-fascist and refugee, said to me ... ‘These Americans – if only they would have green skin! In Africa they are black – in China, yellow – and you know, they are different. Here they look like you and me. But they are different. Source: Karen Michels, ‘European Art Historians Meet the New World’ in Michael F. Zimmerman (ed.), The Art Historian: National Traditions and Institutional Practices: New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 65. Gombrich’s rejection of a career in art history: Vienna 1931 It was in that period, around 1931, that I first met Ernst Kris in his offices in the Kunsthistorische Museum. Nine years younger than he, I was then a student, in my third year, of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Vienna under Julius von Schlosser. Schlosser liked to teach at the Museum and to select for his seminars some puzzling objects, which he asked his students to investigate. I had been assigned the study of a medieval ivory and had to apply to Ernst Kris for permission to examine it in my hands. I remember that this first encounter was not propitious. Kris was not encouraging. He thought there was no chance for me to find out anything which Goldschmidt, the great authority, had not observed before. But though he was critical of the project, he was interested in the student. Indeed, as I had to repeat these visits to his office, he suddenly warmed to the task of opening my eyes to the problems of the calling I had apparently selected in my foolish ignorance. `Why', he burst out, `do you want to study the history of art?' And as I presumably looked rather sheepish, he started on a long and logical indictment of such a career. Do you want to be a dealer? Do you want to write expert opinions for collectors? If not, why are you here? To say you like art is no sufficient reason. If you do and can afford it become a collector yourself. But if your interest is intellectual, you must realize that you have chosen the wrong field. We really know too little about art to make any valid statements. The best our colleagues can do is to escape to some more advanced branch of study; they want to draw on psychology, but really psychology is not yet sufficiently developed to help the art historian. Take my advice, and change your subject. I confess that I was too determined or too lazy to take his advice. But it certainly impressed me to hear such a successful specialist speak with such lack of respect of his own achievements. I tried to laugh it off at the time, and when we produced our annual comedy at the University in 1932 I put these words of Ernst Kris (comically versified) into the mouth of the personification of Doubt, a tempting demon eager to divert the student from his path. Kris was in the audience, and his reaction was characteristic: ‘Tell me’, he said, ‘why do you really study the history of art, if you can write such plays?’ He never retracted, and I now know that this little interview must indeed have had a lasting effect on my development. I never became the kind of art historian Kris wanted to castigate in his homily, indeed I never became the expert and master of a field such as Kris had become before he was thirty. Source: E. H. Gombrich, ‘Ernst Kris (1900-1957: The Study of Art and the Study of Man’, in Tributes: Interpreters of our cultural tradition, Oxford: Phaidon 1984, 223-4. London, after the success of The Story of Art: ... I became sufficiently known so that from the point of view of my career I did not have to worry what my job would be. The position at the Warburg was not so simple because, as I told you, it is not an art-historical institute and I was not an art historian there, but a reader in Renaissance studies. Through the mediation of Kenneth Clark, who had liked some of my writings, I was invited to give the Mellon Lectures in Washington, for which I chose the subject of art and illusion because of my interest in perception and in psychology. This is the first book in which I staked my claim to be interested not only in the history of art as it is taught, but in something different. That difference is an interest in explanations. Explanations are scientific matters: how do you explain an event? I thought that certain aspects of the development of representation in the history of art, which I had discussed in The Story of Art in the traditional terms of ‘seeing and knowing’, deserved to be investigated in terms of contemporary psychology. I spent a good deal of time in psychology libraries. I studied the subject for the sake of explanation — that is, explanation of the phenomenon of style — because the phenomenon of style as it had been seen traditionally did not satisfy me. Style became one of my worries, one of my problems, because the idea that style is simply the expression of an age seemed to me not only to say very little, but to be rather vacuous in every respect. I wanted to know what is actually going on when somebody draws a tree in a particular way, in a particular tradition and in a particular style. By looking into books on psychology, I learned the importance of formulae. When another opportunity arose after the publication of Art and Illusion, and I was invited to give the Wrightsman Lectures in New York, I chose the other side, as it were. I thought, `Well, I have tried to explain something about representation, now I should like to explain something about form or decoration: So I gave a series of lectures which turned into the book The Sense of Order. In other words, my ambition — and it was rather a lofty ambition — was to be a kind of commentator on the history of art. I wanted to write a commentary on what actually happened in the development of art. I sometimes see it as representation in the centre with symbolism on the one hand and decoration on the other. One can reflect about all these things and say something in more general terms. It was my ambition to do precisely this. This, of course, meant that I never became a proper art historian. I never became a connoisseur. I wouldn't say, when people asked me, that I had no opinions about whether this painting is or is not by Raphael, but it isn't my main interest to practise connoisseurship. My main interest has always been in more general types of explanation, which meant a certain kinship with science. Science tries to explain. In history we record, but in science we try to explain single events by referring them to a general regularity. ... So you see that I moved in a certain sense outside the charmed circle of art history. Source: ‘An autobiographical sketch’, in Richard Woodfield (ed.), The Essential Gombrich, London: Phaidon, 1996, 34-05. The Story of Art Origins: Old Masters and Other Household Gods Published in the Independent, 6 January 1990, on the 40th anniversary of the first publication of The Story of Art When I was invited to offer my `second thoughts' about The Story of Art I replied that they would have to be called my fifteenth thoughts, since that book had just been published in its fifteenth edition. If, however, second thoughts are meant to imply distance, I can truly say after 40 years that I have as much distance from the book as any author is ever likely to gain from his brainchild. Maybe I can now place it more easily into its context than I could have done earlier: though the book was written in England and in English, the context is still that of the Vienna of my youth. Like any fine old city Vienna, with its Gothic Cathedral and its sumptuous Baroque churches and palaces, would be likely to stimulate an interest in the history of art in any alert child, but as far as I remember my own interest was also sparked off by the monumental edifices of the nineteenth century that line the broad avenue of the Ringstrasse which encircles the old city. The House of Parliament is in the Greek style, the mighty Town Hall in a version of Gothic, the museums and the University were built in a Renaissance idiom and the Postal Savings Bank pioneered a modern style. I cannot have been more than 12 years of age, possibly less, when this variety prompted me to plan my first art-historical book, a primer of styles based on Vienna's buildings. But if architectural history thus became a natural interest, so did the history of painting. I cannot tell now which came first, my parent's library which contained many books about old masters, or the Kunsthistorisches Museum with its glorious collections brought together by the Habsburgs. Good taste had not yet outlawed the display of photographic reproductions on the walls of our apartment, and it was taken for granted that one knew and respected the works of the masters who belonged to the `canon of excellence' in art, much as Bach, Mozart or Beethoven did in music; Raphael and Michelangelo, Dürer and Rembrandt, but also Fra Angelico and Memling were household gods, the divinities of that middle-class religion that was known as Bildung. The term literally means `formation' but can perhaps best be translated as `mental furniture'. This being so, it was natural that adolescents were given books on art history for Christmas or for birthdays, and in the absence of television and videos they were even read. I especially remember an unpretentious survey by Julius Leisching called Die Wege der Kunst (The Paths of Art, Leipzig, 1911) which I read with gratitude and profit for the first orientation it offered. The Story of Art may be somewhat more sophisticated, but I might never have had the courage to undertake it without the memory of this slim volume which I still own. That added sophistication can be traced back to the revolution in taste that we all witnessed in the immediate post-war period. The narrow confines of the canon were challenged by the wave of Expressionism with its exaltation of medieval and tribal art — previously neglected — and these shifts in preference interested me sufficiently to volunteer writing an extended essay on the vicissitudes of art appreciation since the eighteenth century (a topic that still concerns me). Having decided to read the History of Art and Classical Archaeology at the University of Vienna I became subject to further influences: the so-called `Vienna School' of art history prided itself in having overcome the obsolete notions of `decline' or `decadence'. Late Roman art was in no way inferior to the art of classical Greece and the styles of Mannerism and Baroque merited the same attention as those of the High Renaissance. The new key to the history of art was the notion of continuity, the endurance of traditions behind the changing façades of period styles. This, I believe, is also the underlying theme of The Story of Art, which tries indeed to do justice to every age on its own terms. As a trained art historian, I had to make choices in my specialized research, but the awareness of continuity remained background knowledge to be drawn upon on journeys and in museums. One more biographical fact must perhaps be mentioned: as an unemployed graduate I was given the task of contributing a volume on world history to a series of children's books, and since I had to meet an almost impossible deadline I had no choice except to use such background knowledge of history as remained from my schooldays. To my surprise the book was widely read and has been reprinted in Germany after 50 years, but being written from the vantage point of the capital of Austria it could not be easily adapted for English children. Evidently the same does not apply to The Story of Art; not only, perhaps, because it was written in England, but because the history of art is of more universal relevance than the wars and politics of central Europe which had to come into the earlier book. I must not detain the reader with the concentration of circumstances that made me embark on a second such effort. After an abortive attempt the book was commissioned by the late Dr Horovitz of the Phaidon Press after his young daughter had approved of a sample chapter. This happened during the war when I was a member of the BBC Monitoring Service, and being so far away from active research may have helped me again to see the whole mountain range of the history of art as a continuous outline. It was this vision I attempted to convey when, after the war, I dictated the text, merely looking up examples of illustrations in the books my wife and I happened to own. Though completed in 1949, this text still reflects the outlook I had acquired on the Continent. It is true that in subsequent years I added a good many pages to keep the story `up to-date', and I am not sorry I did so. But maybe the value of the book lies elsewhere. It crystallizes the attitude of a vanished epoch for which art was not a subject of specialized knowledge, let alone of sensational auction prices, but still part of the mental furniture of civilized men and women. Journalists sometimes describe an old country house which has preserved its contents untouched for several generations as a `time capsule'. If The Story of Art is such a time capsule, its unexpected popularity seems to prove that even today readers want to keep contact with the past — their own, and that of art. Source: Richard Woodfield (ed.), The Essential Gombrich, London: Phaidon 1996, 37-9. Prefaces to the first two editions of Art and Illusion PREFACE WHEN I was honoured by an invitation to deliver the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, at the National Gallery in Washington, I proposed as my subject the psychology of representation. I was very grateful to the Trustees for agreeing to a field of inquiry that extends beyond the frontiers of art to the study of perception and optical illusion. For the mysterious way in which shapes and marks can be made to signify and suggest other things beyond themselves had intrigued me since my student days. In my book The Story of Art, I had sketched the development of representation from the conceptual methods of the primitives and the Egyptians, who relied on `what they knew', to the achievements of the impressionists, who succeeded in recording `what they saw'. While thus making use of the traditional distinction between `knowing' and `seeing', I ventured to suggest in my last chapter that the self-contradictory nature of the impressionist programme contributed to the collapse of representation in twentieth-century art. My assertions to the effect that no artist can `paint what he sees' and discard all conventions were of necessity somewhat aphoristic and dogmatic. To clarify and substantiate them I had to re-examine the very theory of perception I had found so serviceable. This book is a record of this reexamination. It does not aim at upsetting the previous interpretation but at justifying and refining it in the light of contemporary work in psychology. The earlier book, in short, applied a traditional hypothesis about the nature of vision to the history of representational styles; this book has the more ambitious aim of using the history of art, in its turn, to probe and test the hypothetical framework itself. Thus I had to assume that the reader would know the main phases of representational styles which are described in the earlier book. No more specialized knowledge than that is required. Even less do I assume a knowledge of psychology, for in this field I am myself a layman and a learner. In stressing this fact, however, I do not want to sound unduly apologetic. As I see it, the great purpose for which the A. W. Mellon Lectures were founded was to keep the discussion of art in flux and to advance the subject. I believe we can do so only if we learn from the artists to shun the ready-made and to take intellectual risks. All I promised my understanding audience in Washington was not to play safe. The seven lectures I gave in the spring of 1956 were entitled `The Visible World and the Language of Art'. All of them are incorporated in this book, the majority with only slight changes (Chapters I, III, X, XI). Of the remaining three, one survives in a considerably extended form as Chapter IX; the other two have expanded into several chapters and constitute sections of Chapters it and v, vii and viii respectively. A good deal of supplementary matter also came from lectures on this general topic which I gave at various times during my tenure of the Slade Professorship at Oxford, at various institutions of the University of London to which I belong, during a visit to Harvard University, and at the annual congress of the British Psychological Society in Durham in 1955, where I outlined my programme of research. Such a process of expansion was probably inevitable as soon as the material here presented was released from the tyranny of the clock. Indeed, my main difficulty was to make the underlying argument sufficiently explicit without allowing every chapter to swell into a volume. Despite much recasting and rewriting, therefore, I decided to take advantage of the lecture form, which enjoys the privilege of leaving stones unturned and avenues unexplored. It also encourages the optimistic assumption that the reader will settle down in a chair, as the listener has to, and will follow the arguments and the illustrations in the sequence in which they are presented. For it should be clear by now that this is not a picture book with explanatory letterpress. It is reading matter with explanatory pictures. The publishers have spared no effort to keep the illustrations close to the passage which they support. The arrangement of the notes serves a similar purpose. We don't interrupt our lectures, as a rule, to bombard the audience with bibliographical data. I have kept the references out of the reader's sight and assembled all the notes at the end, referring back to the pagination of the text and to the topic there discussed. Any reader looking for chapter and verse and seeking a way to further literature should find it easy to spot the relevant information. The full titles of books sometimes cited in a shortened form are listed on page 334. It was no lack of gratitude towards the authors I have used which made me thus remove the titles of their works from immediate view. On the contrary, I should like at this point to acknowledge my profound indebtedness to the self-denying work of those experts, who must have sacrificed years of their lives and much rewarding research to make their knowledge available to nonspecialists. The fact, for instance, that the notes contain some of the quoted passages in the original language and that I have sometimes used my own translations should not obscure my indebtedness to the editors and translators of the Loeb Classical Library. Nor should an occasional reference to individual papers in psychological periodicals hide my dependence on the books which stood on my shelf throughout the time of writing: I have in mind such indispensable surveys as C. E. Osgood, Method and Theory in Experimental Psychology (1953), R. S. Woodworth and Harold Schlosberg, Experimental Psychology (1954), and also the compact, small volume by O. L. Zangwill, An Introduction to Modern Psychology (1950). Among specialized studies of vision, M. D. Vernon, A Further Study of Visual Perception (1952), presents an admirable conspectus, while Wolfgang Metzger, Gesetze des Sehens (2nd edn., 1953), surveys the whole field from the point of view of the Gestalt school. I also owe much to Ralph M. Evans, An Introduction to Color (1948), but most of all to J. J. Gibson, The Perception of the Visual World (1950), which, I hope, prevented me from underrating what the author calls `the awe-inspiring intricacy of vision'. Even closer to the fringe of my intellectual horizon I hope to have profited from D. O. Hebb, The Organization of Behavior (1949), Viktor von Weizsäcker, Der Gestaltkreis (1950), F. H. Allport, Theories of Perception and the Concept of Structure (1955), and most of all, perhaps, F. A. Hayek, The Sensory Order (1952). The enumeration of books representing different schools of psychology will arouse, in the mind of the specialist, the suspicion that my approach must be fundamentally eclectic. Up to a point this suspicion would be justified, but my selection was not without a bias of its own. If any student of the subject should wish to know at this stage what direction this bias took, I would refer him to the famous joint paper by E. C. Tolman and E. Brunswik, `The Organism and the Causal Texture of Environment', Psychological Review, 1935, which stresses the hypothetical character of all perceptual processes. It so happens that I saw this paper only after having completed my book. I do not mention this fact in order to claim originality; I rather want to emphasize the part played by living traditions in the shaping of our selective interests. The paper was written in Vienna in 1934, at a time when I had some fleeting contact with Egon Brunswik, who kindly served as a subject in a series of experiments on the reading of facial expressions in art which I helped to organize under the direction of my late friend Ernst Kris. Above all it was Ernst Kris, the art historian turned psycho-analyst, who, during a friendship lasting more than twenty years, taught me the fruitfulness of a psychological approach. Our joint research into the problem of caricature first brought me up against the question of what is involved in accepting an image as a likeness. The basic results of our research are embodied in an essay in his book Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (1952), on which I have drawn in these chapters. What the printed word can hardly convey was the passion and versatility of his ever-inquiring mind, to which I owe the conviction that the history of art will become sterile unless it is constantly enriched by a close contact with the study of man. It was in the same years, before Hitler's occupation of Vienna, that I was fortunate enough to meet Karl R. Popper, who had just published his book The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Eng. tr., 1959), in which he established the priority of the scientific hypothesis over the recording of sense data. Any acquaintance I may have with problems of scientific method and philosophy I owe to his constant friendship. I should be proud if Professor Popper's influence were to be felt everywhere in this book, though naturally he is not responsible for its many shortcomings. It was from Dr. Gottfried Spiegler, a medical physicist, that I learned to see the interpretation of all images as a philosophical problem. Professor Wolfgang Köhler generously gave me of his time in Princeton and reassured me that the complex questions encountered in the practice of art are still of potential interest to psychological research. Professor Richard Held, of Brandeis University, elucidated several points and introduced me to the department of psychology at Princeton University, where I saw the Ames Demonstrations. Oskar Kokoschka, who invited me to speak at the `School of Seeing' at the Salzburg Summer Academy, convinced me that the mysteries of perception can still fascinate a great artist of our time. Conversations with Professor Roman Jakobson, of Harvard University, and with Professor Colin Cherry, of the Imperial College of Science in London, have given me tantalizing glimpses into the exciting fields of linguistic theory and information theory. ... January 1959 PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION CHANGES in the body of the book are restricted to a few corrections of fact or of wording. Any major alterations would have thrown the careful layout which so successfully dovetails text and illustrations fatally out of gear. But I gladly accepted my publisher's invitation to write a Preface to this second edition. My first duty is surely to thank all those whose interest and understanding have made this reprinting necessary after less than a year. My second duty would be to take account of all criticisms and to remove all sources of misunderstanding that these may have revealed. I cannot do this in a preface, but I can at least draw attention to a few of them. One such stumbling block is still the rash assumption that a book on the rise of illusionist art must want to set up fidelity to nature as the standard of artistic perfection. If my disclaimers on pages 6 and 7 did not suffice, my discussion of caricature and other nonillusionist aspects of representation should have saved me from this misinterpretation. It is an interesting and uncontested fact that many great artists of the past were fascinated by problems of visual truth, but none of them can ever have thought that visual truth alone will make a picture into a work of art. Another group of readers have sought support from this book for the opposite view, according to which the demand for fidelity to nature must always be meaningless since everybody sees nature differently. Actually I have tried to show (e.g., on pages 233f. and 252) that the undeniable subjectivity of vision does not preclude objective standards of representational accuracy. A wax dummy can be indistinguishable from its prototype, and a view through a peephole at a picture may look the same as the view at a solid object quite regardless of who does the viewing or whether he admires or despises the trick. What may have caused this misunderstanding (apart from overstatements on pages 33 and 41, which I have now rectified) is my repeated assertion that no artist can copy what he sees. There is no contradiction here, for the successful trompe l'oeil no less than the striking caricature are not only the result of careful looking but also the fruit of experimentation with pictorial effects. The invention of these effects, as I have tried to show, was stimulated by the dissatisfaction which certain periods of Western civilization felt with images that failed to look convincing. It is the gradual modification of the traditional schematic conventions of image making under the pressure of novel demands that forms one of my main themes. Here I should perhaps point to a less obvious difficulty, which should, however, not be too hard for the reader to overcome. As an historian of art I took the existence and frequency of such schematic vocabularies as my starting point without demonstrating their character in detail. It lies in the nature of this problem that it would need a disproportionate number of illustrations merely to show vast numbers of Egyptian servant figures, Chinese bamboo paintings, Byzantine madonnas, Gothic angels, or Baroque putti in order to prove what an attentive look at museums and art books will confirm—how narrow is the range and how subtle are the variations within which the craftsmen and artists of the past created their masterpieces. For the real purpose of this book is not to describe but to explain the reasons for the unexpected difficulty which artists encountered who clearly wanted to make their images look like nature. I admit that this intention is not always easy to prove, and I am grateful to one of my painter friends, who helped me to formulate my problem afresh by asking me to tell quite simply what would be the opposite of the view I hold. It would be a state of affairs in which every person wielding a brush could always achieve fidelity to nature. The mere desire to preserve the likeness of a beloved person or of a beautiful view would then suffice for the artist to `copy what he sees'. Those would be right who regard all deviations from nature in non-naturalistic styles as intentional. This view looks plausible in our own world because most city dwellers have absorbed a great deal of knowledge of pictorial effects from posters and picture postcards. We have no right whatever to assume a similar freedom of choice for those who cannot pick up the trick at second hand. I recently came across an episode in the memoirs of a painter that illustrates this point. Brought up among orthodox Jews in Poland who did not admit pictorial representations, Jehudo Epstein tells in Mein Weg von Ost nach West (Stuttgart, 1929) how pathetically he failed when he tried for the first time to sketch a castle on a hill in his home town and what a revelation it was to him when somebody then lent him a textbook on perspective. To explain this need of the painter to profit from the experiences of preceding generations I had to investigate in my turn the working of pictorial effects and to ask how they relate to the way we normally process the information that reaches us from the visible world in which we live and move. In my treatment of this question some philosophical critics from the neopositivist camp have objected to my equation of seeing and interpreting. They fear, I suspect, that this approach might undermine the faith in the reliability of sense observations and thus give aid and comfort to their enemies. I do not share their apprehensions, but I am not wedded to any form of words. I would be ready to substitute another for the offensive term `interpretation', provided it described the same process of trial and error by which alone we weed out illusions and test and revise our beliefs about the world, in perception no less than in science. Perhaps I should have been a little more explicit in the presentation of this hypothesis, since no critic has, to my knowledge, taken up the central arguments on pages 231 and 278. None of these discussions about perception will ever solve the mystery of art. I do not believe that any book that claimed to do so could be worth reading. The disappointment which a few critics seem to have felt when they discovered the limited nature of my problem reflects, I fear, the immaturity of the study of art as compared with the study of nature. Those who have made a little progress in the understanding of the metabolism of the heart are rarely reproached nowadays for having failed to solve the mystery of life. Whether or not this book represents such progress in the understanding of pictorial representation and its history depends on the validity of its arguments. And so I return to the great debt of gratitude I owe the many readers whose willingness to enter into these arguments and to join in their examination surpassed my boldest dreams. E. H. G. London, January 1961 Source: E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, Oxford: Phaidon, 1986, vii-xii. Exchange with David Carrier in Leonardo (1985) Gombrich reply to article by David Carrier: The space at my disposal does not allow me to take issue with Norman Bryson's theories, but I can at least assure the reader that I do not hold the views which Professor Carrier attributes to me in the Theoretical Perspectives section of Leonardo 17, No. 4 (1984). I have never entertained "a theory of representation as illusion" and have frequently warned against this facile misinterpretation of the title of Art and Illusion. In fact, I have written in the Preface to The Sense of Order (1979) that I have been "needled by the assumption that I wished to equate art with illusion" and extended my analysis to purely formal configurations including their analogies with music. Even earlier, in Illusion in Nature and Art, published jointly with R. L. Gregory (1973), I pointed out that the title of my Mellon Lectures underlying Art and Illusion had been "The Visible World and the Language of Art" and that the change in title was merely made in the interest of brevity. Thus it really will not do for Professor Carrier to construe a convenient contrast between my alleged "notion of art as illusion" and Bryson's reliance on semiotic theories. In a recent number of the Art Journal (Summer 1984, p.164), I acknowledged the early influence which Karl Buehler's Sprachtheorie (1934) had on my development; witness also my extensive review of Charles Morris, Signs, Language and Behavior in the Art Bulletin of 1949 (pp. 68-75). If the reader cares to look at p.120 of Art and Illusion he will find me making use of the linguistic notion of `distinctive features' in a discussion of board games, which "allow us to study articulation, the creation of distinctions without the intrusion of the problem of likeness or representation". I have continued these trends of thought in various papers of my volume The Image and the Eye (1982), notably in a contribution to the International Conference on the Semiotics of Art at Ann Arbor, Michigan, where, on p.282, the interested reader can also find Professor Nelson Goodman's comments which he kindly allowed me to publish. Unhappily, I was forced to clarify these matters yet again in "Representation and Misrepresentation", Critical Inquiry, December 1984, where I explained why I do not consider the study of image making to be co-extensive with aesthetics. This study (which includes maps, facsimiles, stage sets and holographs) does not only permit but compels us to deal with questions of resemblance and even of illusion, however marginal these may usually be to art. It is precisely because my interests are not confined to either representational or nonrepresentational art that I must regard the visual creations of all ages and cultures as my province and am bound to see my own age in the perspective of this millennial history. E. H. Gombrich 19 Briardale Gardens London NW3 7PW, U.K. Source: LEONARDO, Vol. 18, No. 2, 126, 1985. Carrier’s response to Gombrich’s reply: No books in my working library are more frequently reread than the works of Sir Ernst Gombrich, whose texts provide me, and many other scholars, with a vision of what art history may accomplish. Long ago, when I was a graduate student, Professor Gombrich took the time and trouble to discuss in considerable detail my reading of his research. In my "Gombrich on Art Historical Explanations" (Leonardo 16, No. 2 (1983) pp.91-96) and in a book, Artwriting, which will soon be forthcoming, I show, I hope, that I have learned from his kind responses to my writing. Since I have gained so much from him, nothing would be more ungracious than to quarrel with him now, particularly about the precise interpretation of his work. I hope therefore, that my few, brief remarks may contribute positively to an ongoing debate which, modelled on Sir Karl Popper's theory of scientific experimentation, may lead us all closer to the truth. My goal in providing a commentary to Dr Norman Bryson's remarks was to indicate one perspective on his semiotic theory of art. As the reference in the second footnote indicates, I do not accept entirely Bryson's theory, nor do I agree with his reading of Art and Illusion. Here, then, I present my own reading of Gombrich's work, which differs, I believe, from Bryson's. Art and Illusion contains two lines of thought which are difficult to bring together. On one hand, Gombrich does seem to say that some naturalistic representations are illusions. For example, he writes: "While standing in front of a painting by Jan van Eyck we...believe he succeeded in rendering the inexhaustible wealth of detail that belongs to the visible world" (p.220). "Only in extreme cases...are the illusions of art illusions about our real environment. But they are illusions all the same..." (p.277). "...under the hands of a great master the image becomes translucent" (p.389). Not only in the title, I would think, is a theory of representation as illusion entertained. On the other hand, many other passages focus on the role of convention in representation and explicitly deny that artworks are illusions. For example: "We rarely get into situations where the eye is actually deceived..." (p.246). Here is one way that these two lines of thought might be made consistent with one another. Gombrich argues that "we can train ourselves to switch between readings, but we cannot hold conflicting interpretations" (p.236; see also p.6). So it seems possible to maintain both that representations may be seen as illusions and that they can also, when we switch readings, be viewed as visual signs. If many readers of Art and Illusion have been tempted by the identification of representation with illusion, perhaps that is because they find it difficult to understand how we actually do switch between readings. Michael Podro's "Fiction and Reality in Painting" (Poetik and Hermeneutik Bd. X (Wilhelm Fink Verlag: Munich, 1983): pp.225-237) offers a challenging discussion of this problem. I admire Gombrich's efforts in the papers mentioned in his letter and other work since Art and Illusion to carry further the study of this difficult problem. His books and articles have taught me, a philosopher by training, to be skeptical of the belief that the techniques of philosophy can solve these problems. The lesson I draw from his work, and from such other well known texts as Anthony Blunt's "Illusionistic Decoration in Central Italian Painting of the Renaissance" (Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, April 1959: pp.309-326) and Sven Sandstroem, Levels of Unreality: Studies in Structure and Construction in Italian Mural Painting During the Renaissance (Uppsala, 1963) is that only careful study of concrete examples will advance the analysis. For that reason, I can only regret that Gombrich has not yet taken issue with the details of Bryson's examples. Would not doing so now carry the debate forward? David Carrier Department of History and Philosophy Carnegie-Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 U. S.A. Source: LEONARDO, Vol. 18, No. 2, 126-7, 1985. Mary Beard on ‘Reflections on the Greek Revolution‘ in Art and Illusion (1985) This article will look at the argument of Gombrich's "Reflections". It will not concentrate specifically on the broad philosophical issues that underlie the whole of Art and Illusion (Gombrich 1977); for a critical review of these one can turn to Richard Wollheim's appraisal of the book, reprinted in his On Art and the Mind (Wollheim 1973, 261-289), or to Norman Bryson's recent Vision and Painting (Bryson 1983). Its aim is to reveal for (I believe) the first time the flaws in the explanatory framework that Gombrich adopts for the rise of Greek art. Gombrich's chapter was at the time of its publication (1959) innovatory, and it remains even now an exciting and sometimes insightful piece; but it is, in my view, deeply misleading and provides an uncertain foundation for further work. ... Gombrich's argument is seductive. He is a master of the winning line, the apparently apposite rhetorical question, the timely (if spurious) appeal to commonsense. The reader is carried along in agreement, lulled at the same time by Gombrich's certainty and his paraded diffidence: "narrative art is bound to lead to space and the exploration of visual effects" (Gombrich 1977, 118; my emphasis). Alternatively: "maybe taboos played their part in this sorting out process" (ibid, 123; my emphasis). And again: "the very fact that certain images had survived for immeasurable periods must have appeared as a token of their magic potency" (ibid, 107; my emphasis). It is hard on first, or even second, reading not to be convinced. I hope to show, however, that three major pivots of his argument -- the initiating rôle of the narrative, the continuing process of the refinement of "realism" and the breakdown of that process in the late Roman Empire cannot bear the weight assigned to them. On careful examination Gombrich's delicately balanced argument, with its artful rhetoric, collapses. Source: Mary Beard, ‘Reflections on ‘Reflections on the Greek Revolution’’, Archaeological Review from Cambridge, 4:2 [1985] republished Journal of Art Historiography. Exchange between RW and Robert Bagley on Gombrich’s mode of argument RW: I attach a pdf of two pages of a transcript of a BBC radio broadcast of a conversation between Martin Kemp and Ernst Gombrich transmitted on 20 December 1991. As I said, Gombrich was very concerned with presentational issues. He used Constable’s Wivenhoe Park because it was immediately accessible to his audience in the National Gallery in Washington and for the reasons he gives, not because he thought that Constable was the beand-end-all of the Western naturalistic tradition. [Though, typically, he uses another double negative to make his point!] [Kemp: Thinking on Art and Illusion which is an enormously successful and tremendously influential book and thinking about this question of schema, correction and perfectibility, it sometimes had been said in a way that Constable is the hero of the book, that there is a goal to which art moves, not perhaps in a deterministic way, but with something approaching it. How would you answer the criticism that you are wedded to the naturalistic tradition? Gombrich: Well, as far as Constable is concerned' much as I admire him, this is a rhetorical device of the book. He happened to be an artist who wrote a great deal about his own art and thanks to Leslie we know much of his opinions so I could always quote what a practising painter thought about his problems. I don't pretend that I don't think that there are artists even greater and more successful than Constable, though he is a moving figure in the history of art. As to the allegation or charge that I am really mainly responding to naturalism in art I think that it's hard for me really to understand it, because first of all I did write an even fatter book than Art and Illusion, which is The Sense of Order which deals with decoration and design. I admire enormously a beautiful Persian rug or I have been to the Alhambra and was totally overwhelmed by the Alhambra, so I would not claim that this is the case. Moreover one of my central private interests is music and music is not a naturalistic art. So I don't think that this particular criticism is more than a rather facile misunderstanding.] RB: Without wishing to sound Gombrichian, I think this is a case in which I really have to reply: "Yes, you are absolutely right, I agree with you completely" and then add immediately "But the opposite is even more true..." Look at the first edition of The Story of Art--a book written a decade before Gombrich's National Gallery lectures. Pages 369-76 are devoted to Turner and Constable (and they reproduce two Constables in full-page plates, one in color; Turner gets one halftone). Turner and Constable are compared; then the chapter concludes with a short paragraph that describes what was going on in landscape painting elsewhere in Europe. I quote it in full: "The break with tradition had left artists with the two possibilities which were embodied in Turner and Constable. They could become poets in painting, and seek moving or dramatic effects, or they could decide to keep to the motif in front of them, and explore it with all the insistence and honesty at their command. There were certainly great artists among the Romantic painters in Europe, men such as Turner's contemporary, the German painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), whose landscape pictures reflect the mood of the Romantic lyrical poetry of his time which is more familiar to us through Schubert's songs. His painting of a bleak mountain scenery (Fig. 316) may even remind us of the spirit of Chinese landscape paintings (p. 107, Fig. 97) which also comes so close to the ideas of poetry. But, however great and deserved was the popular success which some of these Romantic painters achieved in their days, we believe today that those who followed Constable's path and tried to explore the visible world rather than to conjure up poetic moods, achieved something of more lasting importance." A lot could be said about that paragraph. Let me just say that, as I read it, Constable has got ranked ahead of Turner and Friedrich (and "the Romantic painters in Europe") because he chose a better path--the path of optical truth. Source: Personal email exchange 23/06/2010 A complaint from Robert Bagley He also has a habit of rejecting an idea that he knows his readers consider absurd and then sneaking back to exactly that idea. "No one today would take seriously the old notion of Loewy, Worringer, and others, that the moon is made of green cheese, for we know a great deal more about the moon now than anyone a century ago did, and the achievements of recent cheese studies are too well known to require rehearsal here, but the problem of the composition of heavenly bodies remains always with us, of course, and given the obvious attraction of a point of view that gives a uniform answer to all such questions, I side with those who believe that the reaction against the dairy position of the generation of Loewy and Worringer has perhaps overshot its mark." Source: Personal email 16/05/2010 The persistence of the past From Arnold Davidson, How to Do the History of Psychoanalysis: A Reading of Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (2001, chapter 3): Automatisms of attitude have a durability, a slow temporality, which does not match the sometimes rapid change of conceptual mutation. Mental habits have a tendency toward inertia, and these habits resist change that, in retrospect, seems conceptually required. Such resistance can take place not only in a scientific community but even in the individual who is most responsible for the conceptual innovation. [. . . ] But given the divergent temporality of new concepts and the formation of new mentalities, it is no surprise that Freud's mental habits never quite caught up with his conceptual articulations. The attitudes that comprise a mentality are sufficiently impervious to recognition, so much like natural dispositions, that many decades may intervene before habit and concept are aligned. (2001, 91) Source: Richard H. Armstrong, A Compulsion for Antiquity:Freud and the Ancient World, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press 2005, 30