Ernst Gombrich (1909–2001)

A good idea executed with mediocrity. This is a general history of the world written for children, but it is entirely too Eurocentric - Eastern cultures are primarily discussed only in how they related to European powers, Native Americans are discussed only briefly - and when he gets to how they interacted with Europeans he says that it is "so shameful to Europeans" that he doesn't even want to talk about it, and Africa is hardly mentioned at all. A better version of this is waiting to happen.

I don't remember why I asked for this book any more, other than that it has something to do with how we see, an issue that permeates many of my interests in teaching and scholarship. I ended up being surprised, then, in that it had a lot to do with my interest in literary realism and what it means to be "realistic": something I often emphasize in my teaching is that being "realistic" is usually a set of codes and tropes. Like, George Eliot considered herself to be realistic in Adam Bede in show more the 1850s. But modernism in the early twentieth century was also about being realistic, but "realistic" for Virginia Woolf was a very different set of things than it was for Eliot. E. H. Gombrich's books is about the history of "realistic" art, and something he captures very well is that "realistic" has always been a set of conventions: we very rarely draw from life; rather, there are certain ways that we signal "this is drawn from life" even as it is drawn from artistic convention. The Pre-Raphaelites and the Impressionists were both aiming for realistic, they just had different ways of creating the illusion of realism. Or as he himself puts it: "in all styles the artist has to rely on a vocabulary of forms and that it is the knowledge of this vocabulary rather than a knowledge of things that distinguishes the skilled from the unskilled artist" (293).

The peak of the book is really Chapter IX, "The Analysis of Vision in Art," where Gombrich unites the previous eight chapters to deliver a series of key insights. (The following two chapters kind of feel like filler.) First is that the "achievement of innocent passivity" is probably impossible: everything we see is filtered through our preconceptions: "Whenever we receive a visual impression, we react by docketing it, filing it, grouping it in one way or another, even if the impression is only that of an inkblot or a fingerprint" (297). All perception is relative. Gombrich argues that even John Ruskin, who was a big advocate of the idea of the "innocent eye," actually understood this: he "demands a willingness to use a pigment which in isolation still looks unlike the area to be matched in order that it may look like it in the end [i.e., in the completed picture]" (310).

I liked Gombrich's point that all representation thus becomes referential, and I think something similar is true in literature. Each artist and each artistic movement learns to see "reality" from the previous one: "If Constable saw the English landscape in terms of Gainsborough's paintings, what about Gainsborough himself? We can answer this. Gainsborough saw the lowland scenery of East Anglia in terms of Dutch paintings which he arduously studies and copied. [...] All paintings, as Wölfflin said, owe more to other paintings than they owe to direct observation" (316-17). In literature, the postmodernists owe the modernists owe the naturalists owe the realists owe the romantics and so on, each one deriving their attempts to depict "reality" from each other more than reality itself.

The result of this in art (and, I suspect, in literature) is that "when complete fidelity to visual experience had become both a moral and an aesthetic imperative" (311), everything fell apart: "if you were really faithful to your vision in every detail the equation would not work out: the elements will not fuse in the end into a convincing whole" (312). This gives us both alternate attempts at representing the real, and also movements like cubism, which "kicked aside the whole tradition of faithful vision and tried to start again from the 'real object' which they squashed against the picture plane" (312). But Gombrich is careful to assert that art is not subjectivity all the way down: we absorb some subjecivities into our vocabulary because they say something compelling to us about reality:

"There is such a thing as a real visual discovery, and there is a way of testing it [...]. Whatever the initial resistance to impressionist paintings, when the first shock had worn off, people learned to read them. And having learned this language, they went into the fields and woods, or looked out of their windows onto the Paris boulevards, and found to their delight that the visible world could after all be seen in terms of these bright patches and dabs of paint. [...] The impressionists had taught them, not, indeed, to see nature with an innocent eye, but to explore an unexpected alternative that turned out to fit certain experiences better than did any earlier paintings. [...] As Oscar Wilde said, there was no fog in London before Whistler painted it." (324)

Which, I would once again hold, is true of good literature as much as good painting. This book has a lot to say about visual illusion, but it's also a very good introduction to the importance of conventions in all forms of art, both the perpetuating of them and the upending of them.

(The reproduction of images in my copy, a 2000 "millennium edition" and 14th printing, was often muddy. I don't know if the book looked like this originally in 1960, but it was sometimes difficult to make out the details Gombrich's text was alluding to.) show less

Summary: A history of the world, written for children, by a famous art historian and illustrated with woodcut drawings.

E. H. Gombrich was best known as an art historian whose most well-known work is The Story of Art. In 1935, while unemployed, a publishing acquaintance asked him if he would look at a children's history book with the idea of translating it into German. Gombrich did, and responded that he could probably write something better himself and was invited to submit a chapter. He show more wrote one on chivalry. Here is how the published version begins:

"I am sure you have heard of knights of old from the Age of Chivalry. And you have probably read books about knights and their squires who set out in search of adventure; stories full of shining armour, plumed helmets and noble steeds, blazoned escutcheons and impregnable fortresses, jousting and tournaments where fair ladies give prizes to the victors, wandering minstrels, forsaken damsels and departures for the Holy Land. The best thing is that all of it really existed. All the glitter and romance is no invention. Once upon a time the world really was full of colour and adventure, and people joyfully took part in that strange and wonderful game called chivalry, which was often played in deadly earnest" (p. 137).

Gombrich ended up writing the whole book in six weeks. Late in life, after the formation of the European Union in 1990, he agreed to update his work in English translation, and added a chapter on world events in his lifetime, including the horror of the Holocaust, working with translator Caroline Mustill.

As you may sense, Gombrich is a story teller which, as both Barbara Tuchman and David McCullough have noted, is basic to the good writing of history. Gombrich gives us enough of the significant factors and people behind events without becoming laborious. Chapters are short, five to ten pages in length. Woodcut illustrations and maps at needed points complement the readable text.

Of course, a work of this size has to be a selective history of the world, but Gombrich's account extends from pre-historic eras to the beginnings of civilization in Egypt and the Middle East, Jewish history, the Persians and Greeks, India and Chinese history, Rome, the beginnings of Christianity, the zenith and fall of the Roman empire, the Middle Ages, the rise of cities, Renaissance, Reformation, the age of discovery, wars and the rise of modern states in Europe, World War 1, and then the Second World War, holocaust, and the bomb. Along the way are chapters on literacy, chivalry, and machines. The focus is European history while touching on important developments in the Americas, India, China and Japan. There is almost nothing about Africa. All this reflects a work written for European school children. Someone writing today might have included more material on ancient Central and South American peoples and African tribal life. Yet as an account helping European students understand the history that shaped Europe, it makes total sense.

I think this the perfect book for an adult who finds themselves wanting a basic sense of the flow of human history. Many of us weren't paying attention in our history classes, or they weren't presented in such an interesting fashion. Even for history lovers, this might suggest periods of history you've overlooked. I realized that I really haven't read much medieval history -- the period between the fall of the Roman empire and the Reformation is pretty much a blank for me. Above all, in Gombrich we have a deeply thoughtful, gentle, and clear voice introducing us to the human story through the ages, which is the story of us all. show less

"It is the job of the historian to make intelligible what actually happens, it is the job of the critic to criticise what happens."

E H Gombrich (30-03-1909 to 03-11-2001) was both an art historian and an art critic. He was asked to write a text book on the history of art for young people, however his love of art and experience as an art critic resulted in this being much more than a mere text book. He said he wanted to "open eyes and not set tounges wagging" and so he kept technical details show more to a minimum. His modus operandi was to demonstrate, with reference to the many superb illustrations, what the artist was trying to achieve and what we the viewer should be looking for when we view a painting, sculpture or building.

Gombricht does not stray far from the western canon and guides the reader through primitive art, Egyptian art, Classical art, Medieval art, the Renaissance (where he is particularly strong), Northern European art, Neo classicism, Pre-Raphaelites, the Impressionists, Expressionism, Modern Art and Experimental Art. He is keen to point out that art has not developed through all of these phases, but that they are links in a chain. He manages to pack into his story enough historical context so that he can demonstrate why artists painted as they did, why art has changed through the ages and what the viewer of art demanded from the artists. It is a full and well rounded history.

He tackles head on issues for the beginner in art appreciation, encouraging them to go and see as much art as possible. He explains that much great art is not so concerned with an accurate depiction of its subject; it does not aim to look "like real". The artist is more concerned with showing a thought, a feeling, or an idea and in addition will have issues in separating out what he sees from what he knows. The arrangement of form and the selection of colours are of prime concern to the painter.

It has been said that Gombrich was no lover of modern art, but you would never guess this from his book. His writing about the impressionists and those that followed is extremely interesting and his thoughts on the influence of the art critics gives much food for thought. Throughout the book the thoughts and ideas expressed will be of interest to the art lover as well as the beginner and his point about the crisis for the art critic in todays art world bears repetition. He says that the critics got it horribly wrong when they denigrated the impressionists at their first few exhibitions in Paris and ever since they have been afraid of missing the boat again. He laments that today (1960's when he was writing) critics are little more than chroniclers of art, more concerned with not making a false step than indulging in serious criticism. He says in his postscript to the 1966 edition:

"I took it for granted it was the duty of the critic and of the historian to explain and to justify all artistic experiments in the face of hostile criticism. Today the problem is rather that the shock has worn off and that almost anything experimental seems acceptable to the press and the public. If anybody needs a champion today it is the artist who shuns rebellious gestures".

He goes on to say:

"We have no guarantee that our new responsiveness will not lead us to neglect a real genius among us who forges ahead regardless of fashion and publicity. Moreover the absorption in the present could easily cut us off from our heritage if we came to regard the art of the past as the mere foil against which the new conquests acquire meaning".

In this postscript Gombrich the art critic takes the reins from Gombrich the historian, but it no less fascinating for that. This is a superb story of art, full of insight and an excellent introduction for the beginner and still thought provoking for the art lover.

A final word from Gombrich

"There is really no such thing as Art. There are only artists - men and women, that is, who are favoured with the wonderful gift of balancing shapes and colours till they are "right" show less