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Sir Ernst Gombrich (1909-2001) |
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Austrian/British writer of art, the author of The Story of Art (1950), which has been translated into some 20 languages. Originally the work was intended for teen-agers, but due to its insights and superb style, it was soon accepted by universities as a textbook. Gombrich also wrote studies in the art of the Renaissance and on the psychology of pictorial representation. His Art and Illusion (1960) was listed by Sir Hugh Trevor-Roper as one of five or six greatest and most influential books published in the late 20th-century. "Indeed, the true miracle of the language of art is not that it enables the artist to create the illusion of reality. It is that under the hands of a great master the image becomes translucent. In teaching us to see the visible world afresh, he gives us the illusion of looking into the invisible realms of the mind - if only we know, as Philostratus says, how to use our eyes." (from Art and Illusion) Ernst Gombrich was born in Vienna, the son of Dr. Karl B. Gombrich, a lawyer, and Professor Leonia (née Hock) Gombrich. He grew up in cultured, musical surroundings. His mother was a pianist, who had been taught by Bruckner. Her friends and acquaintances included Freud, who told Jewish anecdotes, the composer Gustav Mahler, Schoenberg, and the violinist Adolf Busch. Gombrich himself played cello. Both of his parents were of Jewish origin, but religion did not play central role in the family. Under the scheme arranged by the Save the Children Fund, Gombrich was sent after World War I to Sweden, where he lived with his sister Lisbeth with a coffin-maker for nine months. After returning back to Austria, Gombrich entered the Theresianum, a conservative school concentrating on classics. From 1928 to 1935 he studied history of art and archaeology at the University of Vienna, where Alois Riegl's legacy of formalism was reshaped with the insights of Gestalt psychology. Gombrich also attended lectures on psychology and philosophy. At that time the Vienna Circle of philosophers, led by Moritz Schlick, produced their most important works. The Circle also inspired such thinkers as Michael Polanyi, Friedrich von Hayek, Karl Popper and Gombrich, who came to prominence after the rise of the Nazis caused them to flee to the West. Gombrich's dissertation examined the architecture of the 16th-century artist Giulio Romano. With Ernst Kris, a friend of Freud, he collabotated on a book on the history of caricature – the work was published in an abbreviated version in 1940. Gombrich married Ilse Heller, pupil of her mother. Their
only son, Richard Francis Gombrich, became an Indologist and one
of the world's best known scholars on Buddhism. Gombrich's first book, Weltgeschichte
von der Urzeit bis zur Gegenwart (1936, A Little History of the
World), which he wrote in Vienna under great time pressure, was
dedicated to his wife. The history primer for children was a
popular success but the Nazis considered it "too pacifist" and
stopped the further publication. "But what you must never
forget is the importance for our own lives of tolerance, reason and
humanity – the three findamental principles of the Enlightenment",
Gombrich stressed to his readers. When he revised the book for its
50th anniversary, Gombrich added a new chapter in 1985, entitled 'The
Small Part of the History of the World Which I Have Lived Through
Myself,' to the original 39 chapters. This book, his only one
written in German, did not appear in English until 2005. In 1936 Gombrich was employed as a staff member of the Warburg Institute, which had emigrated from Hamburg to London. Most of his family members, who remained in Austria, were killed after "Anschluss," the 1938 Union of Austria with Nazi Germany. Gombrich also wrote an intellectual biography of Aby Warburg (1866-1929), the founder of the Institute, who was cultural historian and especially interested in the survival and transformations of the classical traditions. This line of research marked Gombrich's studies in the art of Renaissance, too. Warburg had build an unique collection of books, and its resources attracted exiled European scholars. However, as innovative as Warburg's anthropological study of art had been in its time, Gombrich brought to light its racialist overtones: "A convinced evolutionist he saw in the Indians of New Mexico a stage of civilization which corresponded to the phase of paganism ancient Greece left behind with dawn of rationalism." During
World War II Gombrich served at the Monitoring Service
of the BBC. He interpreted German radio broadcasts, looking for hidden
meanings from propaganda. Gombrich witnessed the war, as he said, "not
only through the British news media and the realities of life
'somewhere in the country', as the formula was, but also through the
distorting mirror in which Goebbels wanted the German people to see
it." At the end of the war, when Hitler committed suicide, Gombrich was
the first to carry the news to Prime Minister Winston Churchill. To
this period he returned in Myth
and Reality in German War-Time Broadcasts (1970). In 1947 Gombrich became naturalized British citizen. From 1959 to 1959 he was Durning-Lawrence Professor of the History of Art at University College. In 1959 he was Unity Professor of Fine Art at Harvard, and became in the same year Director of the Warburg Institute and Professor of the History of the Classical Tradition at the University of London, serving there until his retirement in 1976. In 1968-69 he was Lethaby Professor at the Royal College of Art, and in 1970 Andrew D. White professor-at-large at Cornell. Gombrich received a CBE in 1966 and was knighted in 1972. Ernst Gombrich died on November 3, 2001 in London. Shortly before his death, Gombrich completed The Preference for the Primitive (2002). "Gombrich is always worth reading even if some of his betes noires, like the concept of the "Zeitgeist," have now passed onto the compost heap of history," said Bruce Boucher in the New York Times (September 1, 2002). In Art and Illusion Gombrich explored the links between perception and art. The work was partly based on the A.W. Mellon Lectures he gave in the spring of 1956, entitled 'The Visible World and the Language of Art'. Gombrich dealt with such questions as the imitation of nature, the function of tradition, the validity of perspective and the interpretation of expression. He argued challenging that no artist can copy what he or she sees: "The artist cannot copy a sunlit lawn, but he can suggest it." To describe reality an artist needs a medium and a schema, a vocabulary, which can be modified. A painter doesn't examine the nature of the physical world but the nature of our reactions to it. Foreshortening produces the impression of depth, other keys to the mind of a beholder are for example the tonal system of modelling and highlights for texture. Gombrich supposes that Leonardo da Vinci's dissatisfaction with his art was due to his realization that "all the artist's knowledge and inanimation are of no avail, it is only a picture that he has been painting, and it will lock flat." Like Heinrich Wölfflin, he believed that all pictures owe more to other pictures than they do to the nature. Throughout history artists have learned more from tradition, studying other paintings, making discoveries of appearances, than making direct and careful observations of the world around them. Thus the history of representational art follows piecemeal inventions of pictorial effects. Gombrich compares the long history of visual discoveries to learning by trial and error. 'Reading' an image also needs training, it is not automatic. Gombrich quotes Ruskin who said that "the truth of nature is not to be discerned by the uneducated senses". When the painter's skill in suggesting is matched by the public's skill in taking hints, a two-dimensional colored canvas turns into a landscape, and the enormous gulf between picture and the visible three-dimensional world is crossed. Gombrich considers cubism the most radical attempt to reveal the mechanisms of an illusionist reading by introducing contrary clues which resist all attempts to see in a painting three-dimensional objects. "Images apparently occupy a curious position somewhere between the statements of language, which are intended to convey a meaning, and the things of nature, to which we only can give a meaning. At the unveiling of the Piccadilly fountain one of the speakers called it 'a remarkably suitable memorial to Lord Shafterbury, for it is always giving water to rich and poor alike...'. It was an easy, indeed a somewhat trite comparison to make; nobody would infer from it that fountains mean philanthropy - quite apart from the fact that giving to the rich would not fall under this concept." (from Symbolic Images, 1972) Meditations on a Hobby Horse (1963) was a volume of lectures and essays on a wide range of subjects, from the writings of André Malraux to the art of the cartoonist. Gombrich's Norm and Form (1966) was devoted to problems of style, patronage and taste in the Italian Renaissance. The learned work was not intended for the general reader. His Wrightsman Lectures were published as A Sense of Order (1979), a study of decorative art. Symbolic Images (1972) brought together Gombrich's essays on Botticelli, Mantegna, Raphael, Giulio Romano, and Nicolas Poussin. In this work the interest was in mythological, astrological, allegorical and theological themes in Renaissance art. Gombrich suggests that it was Apuleius' tale in the Golden Ass – not Poliziano's poem in the Giostra – which served as a source for Botticelli's famous painting the 'Primavera'. The painting has puzzled generations of art lovers. Gombrich's hypothesis was rejected by Erwin Panofsky, a member of the circle around Aby Warburg. Warburg himself had tried in his doctoral thesis to establish a connection between Poliziano's stanze and the 'Primavera'. When the essay was reprinted nearly 25 years after it appearance in Symbolic Images, Gombrich expressed some reservations about it: "However much I stressed the hypothetical character of this connection with Apuleius, I did not help matters by suggesting the possibility that the programme may have rested on a misunderstanding of the text." Gombrich's work show the influence of the philosopher Karl Popper, who was his close friend, and with whom he shared a hostility to vague thinking. Also Wolfgang Köhler's studies in perceptual psychology left traces in Gombrich's thinking. In Art and Illusion he gives the full credit to Popper in his rejection of the "bucket theory of the mind"' and emphasizing the activity of the living organism that never ceases probing and testing its environment. "There is no rigid distinction, therefore, between perception and illusion", Gombrich writes. Popper himself said that Gombrich had made "a more imaginative and better-informed application of his ideas to art than anything he could have done himself." (from Confession of a Philosopher by Bryan Magee, 1997) For further reading: World Authors 1950-1970, ed. by John Wakeman (1975); Looking for Answers: Conversations on Art and Science by Ernst Gombrich and Didier Eribon (1993); Sight & Insight: Essays on Art and Culture in Honour of E.H. Gombrich at 85, ed. by E. H. Gombrich, John Onians (1994); Aesthetic Criteria: Gombrich and the Philosophies of Science of Popper and Polanyi by Sheldon Richmond (1994); The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. by Donald Preziosi (1998); E. H. Gombrich: A Bibliography by J. B. Trapp (2000); Art History: A Critical Introduction to Its Methods by Michael Hatt and Charlotte Klonk (2006) - Note: In the introduction of Art and Illusion Gombrich deals with visually ambiguous figures familiar from psychology textbooks. His own example is the duck-rabbit figure – the Necker cube and reversible staircase are similar much used examples. We see the figure sometimes as a rabbit, sometimes as a duck, but never both ways simultaneously. Gombrich concludes that to see the shape apart from its interpretation is not possible. Philosophically, as G.L. Hagberg points out in Art as Language (1995), this can generate the idea of radically incommensurable world views, each carrying its own internally generated criteria for verification and certainty. Richard Wollheim criticizes in Art and Its Object (1980) Gombrich's central thesis – that in looking at representational pictures, we are incapable of seeing the medium and the object at the same time – in Gombrich "seeing canvas" / "seeing nature" disjunction. Wollheim defends his "twofold" thesis with several arguments, stating among others that "in Titian, in Vermeer, in Manet we are led to marvel endlessly at the way in which line or brushstroke or expanse of color is exploited to render effects or establish analogies that can only be identified representationally, and the argument is that this virtue could not have received recognition if, in looking at pictures, we had to alternate visual attention between the material features and the object of the representation." Selected works:
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