Encyclopedia entry on Gombrich more

Professor Sir Ernst Gombrich OM was born in Vienna in 1909 and died in London on November 3, 2001, aged 92. He studied at the Theresianum and then at the Second Institute of Art History in the University of Vienna under Julius von Schlosser (1928-33). After graduating he worked as a Research Assistant for and then collaborator with, the museum curator and Freudian analyst Ernst Kris. He immigrated to England and joined the Warburg Institute in London as a Research Assistant in 1936. During World War 2 he was employed by the BBC as a Radio Monitor. After the war he rejoined the Warburg Institute as Senior Research Fellow (1946-8), Lecturer (1948-54), Reader (1954-6), Special Lecturer (1956-9) and Director (1959-76). He was also Slade Professor of Fine Art, Oxford University 1950-53; Durning-Lawrence Professor of the History of Art, London University 1956-59; Professor of the History of the Classical Tradition 1959-76 (Emeritus); Visiting Professor of Fine Art, Harvard University 1959; FBA 1960; FSA 1961; Slade Professor of Fine Art, Cambridge University 1961-63; Lethaby Professor, Royal College of Art 1967-68; Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large, Cornell University 1970-77; FRSL 1975. He was awarded the CBE in1966, a knighthood in 1972 and the Order of Merit in 1988. He received numerous prizes and distinctions. His major publications include The Story of Art (1950), Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960), Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (1970), The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art. His book, The Preference for the Primitive, which he completed before his death, was published in July 2002. Gombrich’s most famous work in the academic community was Art and Illusion. It has been cited across the whole scholarly arena from the humanities, through the social sciences across to the physical and biological sciences. It is still the subject of heated controversy over forty years since its original publication. Within philosophy it has been cited to support a wide variety of contradictory positions. Much to Gombrich’s chagrin, Nelson Goodman cited it to support his conventionalist views on pictorial representation; others have taken it as an extreme statement of an illusionist theory of art. The title of the book misrepresents its contents, which are better captured by the subtitle ‘A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation’; it is neither about Art nor about Illusion. The contradictory receptions of Art and Illusion were largely caused by two factors: a multidisciplinary and apparently eclectic approach to its subject and a rhetorical mode of address. Originally delivered as a series of public lectures in Washington’s National Gallery, it was aimed at a cultivated public rather than a specialist scientific audience. As a consequence he used memorable formulations, such as ‘making comes before matching’, vivid illustrations, such as his use of Jastrow’s duck-rabbit to illustrate perceptual ambiguity, and striking metaphors. By contrast his later collection of essays The Image and the Eye largely resulted from presentations to scientific audiences with a consequently more rigorous use of examples and language. Unsurprisingly he has been accused of a ‘change of heart’, shifting from conventionalist humanist to positivist scientist. In truth his work has been completely consistent from his earliest publications in the Viennese journal Kritische Berichte to his posthumous publication The Preference for the Primitive. Gombrich’s interest in the application of the psychology of perception to the study of the history of art started in his student years in Vienna. While he was studying with Schlosser, Hans Sedlmayr and Otto Pächt revived interest in the work of Alois Riegl. Sedlmayr rejected Riegl’s psychological views as old fashioned and inadequate to the task, replacing them with the newly fashionable gestalt psychology. Gombrich pursued the psychological approach through attending the seminars of Karl Bühler where he came into contact with Egon Brunswick. Bühler held one of Vienna’s chairs of philosophy and was deeply interested in linguistics, the psychology of perception and, what he called, sematology. Both Brunswick and Karl Popper, who Gombrich met after he arrived in England, had the same doctoral advisers: Bühler and Moritz Schlick. Bühler’s approach to problems was deeply philosophical, in the best sense of the word, and left its indelible mark on Gombrich’s thought to the point where he took some of his seminal notions for granted. Although Bühler’s ideas figure throughout Art and Illusion, he was never named once. On leaving university Gombrich worked with Ernst Kris on a project that moved from an enquiry into expression into an historical and psychological investigation of caricature. They published a shortened version of their findings in the British Journal of Medical Psychology in 1938. During the war Gombrich’s work, for the BBC Monitoring Service, gave him an increased interest in the problems of the psychology of perception. His popular book The Story of Art embedded an ecological approach to the study of visual imagery, a developed sense of the role of tradition in the generation of artistic styles, and the theory that visual imagery produced in the Western naturalist tradition moved from a representation of what was known to what was seen. On completing the manuscript in 1947 he sent a book proposal to Walter Neurath, a fellow émigré from Vienna and owner of Thames and Hudson. It was called “The Realm and Range of the Image” and laid the ground for his later publications on naturalistic imagery and symbolism. After the war, Gombrich re-established contact with Ernst Kris and in the following year became a frequent visitor to the United States, where he engaged in conversation with émigré psychologists and linguisticians. An early product of his visits was his 1949 review of Charles Morris’s Signs, Language and Behaviour for the American Art Bulletin, which displayed his familiarity with the British and American traditions of semiotics. In England he pursued his research in the library of the British Psychological Society at Senate House in the University of London and in 1955 he presented ‘Art History and the Psychology of Perception' to its annual conference. His lecture opened by establishing the legitimacy of ‘trespassing as a scientific technique’. A principle theme of the lecture was the role that categorisation played, both in language and perception. Following Bühler’s example he declared ‘representation is from the outset a symbolic process. It is representation through or in a medium.’ Riegl’s approach was not entirely wrong: … in a way Riegl was right when he rejected the naïve idea, that one can measure or discuss the degree to which a work of art represents reality. And he was right not only because the medium, as we have seen, creates a Mental Set in the terms of which Nature is perceived, but also, one suspects, because what we call ‘style’ may do the same. At the same time we have learned that it is much more difficult to pin down these subtle matters than he knew. Granted that “Nature” or “Reality” is unstable. Does it make sense to say that the Egyptians or Impressionists painted the world “as they saw it”? … where do we go from here? (Durham ms., p. 9a) Art and Illusion was concerned to answer that rhetorical question but his characterisation of his approach as a study in the ‘linguistics of the image’ was a formulation that was to bedevil reception of the book. The theoretical roots of Art and Illusion can be found in its footnotes, with the inexplicable absence of Bühler’s work. As it was the tradition in Anglo-American thought to treat the psychology of perception as a distinct field from linguistics and as the same tradition failed to problematize the naturalistic image, critical responses were effectively left groping in the dark. Gombrich’s apparently eclectic approach to psychology was biased in the direction of E.C. Tolman and E. Brunswick’s ‘The Organism and the Causal Texture of Environment’, Psychological Review, 1935. His approach to linguistics was grounded in Bühler’s Organonmodell of linguistic communication applied in his book Sprachtheorie: Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache (Jena 1934) to Symbolfelder in nichtsprachlichen Darstellungsgeräten (Symbolic Fields in Nonlinguistic Instruments of Representation). The Anglo-American perceptual hypothesis model was different from Brunswick’s probabilistic functionalism framed in the light of Popper’s conjectural model. Richard Wollheim failed to grasp the implications of this strange concoction in his influential review. If, as Wollheim argued, perception followed the path of schema and correction, the image-maker could have no exit to a real world independent of the workings of the schema. But this fails to recognize that the pictorial image is structurally different from the real world: one cannot perceptually move around in an image but one can in the real world. In Gibsonian terms, invariant structures are revealed by movement. The static image can be corrected by the practice of visual intervention in the real world. The naturalistic artist is not the passive recipient of sense-data but an interventionist who tests two-dimensional variants against invariant structures. In his Durham Lecture, and since, Gombrich was critical of the Whorf-Sapir theory that one’s experience of the world was constituted by language. The Greeks did not have limited colour perception as a consequence of their limited range of colour words. Language can become enormously inventive in relation to colour variety, as paint catalogues have demonstrated. Language responds to the need to differentiate and so does naturalistic imagery, which proceeds by re-articulating schemata: The schemata themselves serve as standards of comparison as classes of spatial relationships and we know by now that it is on such models of relationships that all representation is grounded. (Durham, p. 11) Without further instructions the process of mutual induction will take place. Insist on a perfect copy, however, and the artist will concentrate not on the schema, but on its successive corrections, he will not look for forms which match but for forms which are not yet matched and in this process he will succeed to adjust the form to any required degree of accuracy just by adopting what has been called a stimulus concentration, and analytical attitude. (Durham, p. 14) But that was an analysis, for the benefit of his audience of psychologists, which was based on copying a Rorschach inkblot, to demonstrate that the idea of a perfect copy was not incoherent. By contrast, Art and Illusion, which was aimed at an art loving public, opens with a demonstration that it is not possible to produce a perfect copy of the subject of John Constable’s Wyvenhoe Park. Every picture of Wyvenhoe Park would be a relational model that would emphasise some features of the park at the expense of others depending upon the possibilities open to the medium. Many readers of Art and Illusion created problems for themselves by insisting on a dichotomy between nature and convention. They were not helped by Gombrich’s later frequent references to that dichotomy, for example in the introduction to his paper ‘Image and Code: Scope and Limits of Conventionalism in Pictorial Representation’, reprinted in The Image and the Eye. But as Gombrich himself argued in that paper the traditional opposition between ‘nature’ and convention’ turns out to be misleading. What we observe is rather a continuum between skills which come naturally to us and skills which may be next to impossible for anyone to acquire. (p. 283) He also consistently argued that whilst the adoption of one point linear perspective was a convention of the Western naturalist tradition, it was nevertheless an objective scientific discovery resting on the physical fact that it is impossible to see, unaided, around corners. Its use was not so much a matter of Art as of image construction. BIBLIOGRAPHY Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960) Meditations on a Hobby Horse (1963) Illusion in Nature and Art, ed. RL Gregory & EH Gombrich (1973) The Image and the Eye: Further studies in the psychology of pictorial representation Oxford 1982. Other relevant works Gombrich on Art and Psychology, ed. Richard Woodfield (Manchester 1996) The Essential Gombrich, ed. Richard Woodfield (1996) EH Gombrich: A Bibliography, ed. J. B. Trapp (2000)