Historical Context
Gombrich and World War II
Though Gombrich's book Art and Illusion was not released until 1960, many of the concepts within it stemmed from his experiences in London during World War II. Both critics and biographers, as well as Gombrich himself in Part Three of the book, acknowledge this influence. While working for the British Broadcasting Corporation's Monitoring Services division, Gombrich formulated numerous ideas about perception. His role involved listening to and translating German radio broadcasts throughout the six years of the war. The British government aimed to extract information about German plans through this surveillance. However, the transmissions were frequently faint or distorted. Consequently, Gombrich honed his ability to "fill in the gaps," so to speak. As he describes in Art and Illusion,
Some of the transmissions that intrigued us most were often barely audible, and it became quite an art, or even a sport, to interpret the few whiffs of speech sounds. . . . It was then we learned to what an extent our knowledge and expectations influence our hearing. You had to know what might be said in order to hear what was said.
For Gombrich, understanding what he heard necessitated aligning it with his internal catalogue of potential German word combinations. The challenge in this process was ensuring that his expectations did not lead to fabricating illusions about what he heard. He had to rely on both his understanding of possibilities and his critical thinking skills. As the recipient of auditory information, Gombrich needed to evaluate both the words and their contexts while being mindful of his own expectations.
Without this wartime experience of listening and translating, Gombrich might not have explored how expectations influence the reception of sensory input or considered the significance of perception psychology in art comprehension. Art viewers fill in gaps based on their internal catalogues of possibilities. Furthermore, according to Gombrich, "the context of action creates conditions of illusions." Context and expectation shape the meaning viewers assign to artworks, just as Gombrich and his colleagues used context and expectation to interpret German communications.
The Importance of Art and Illusion
Critics are almost entirely in agreement about Art and Illusion: they regard it as the most significant work of Gombrich's career, and they view Gombrich as the most impactful art historian of the twentieth century. Indeed, it is challenging to overstate the importance of this book. Perhaps its greatest achievement is its effort to link the appreciation of artistic creation with the scientific study of perception. Gombrich meticulously argues that the meaning of art is found in the interactive communication between artists and viewers. He dismisses the idea of a transcendent zeitgeist, or spirit of the times, that dictates artistic representation. Additionally, he refutes Ruskin’s nineteenth-century concept that art could be viewed with ‘‘an innocent eye.’’ For Gombrich, the innocent eye was an unattainable abstraction. Both the artist's perspective and the viewer's experience are inevitably influenced by cultural and historical contexts. The fact that this idea seems so self-evident in the early twenty-first century reflects how deeply Gombrich’s work has been integrated into all art history studies.
Style and Technique
Narration
Narration involves recounting a series of events, typically in chronological order, to form a story. In his work, The Story of Art, Gombrich crafts a narrative that brings coherence to the history of art. Similarly, in Art and Illusion , Gombrich aims to ‘‘explain why art has a history.’’ Although he starts with the 19th-century artist John Constable, Gombrich quickly shifts back to ancient Greek art to begin his tale of ‘‘making and matching.’’ His narrative explores how artists use both tradition and innovation...
(This entire section contains 245 words.)
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in their quest to depict reality. Additionally, Gombrich’s narration considers the transformations artists undergo and the adjustments viewers must make when faced with new artistic representations of reality. By choosing a narrative approach, the book, despite its length and occasional technical jargon, remains accessible to a general audience.
Metaphor
A metaphor is a literary device that conveys an idea by comparing two different objects or concepts. In Art and Illusion, Gombrich employs language as a metaphor for art. He proposes that artists develop a ‘‘vocabulary’’ of artistic schemata that enables them to create their images. However, the schemata available during any historical period can also serve as a constraint within which artists operate. Gombrich compares these schemata to a writer’s vocabulary, which both constructs and limits what the writer can produce. By using terms such as ‘‘language of representation,’’ ‘‘reading,’’ ‘‘grammar,’’ and ‘‘articulation,’’ Gombrich reinforces the metaphor that art and language are similar forms of human expression and communication.
Compare and Contrast
1950s: In the aftermath of World War II, Europe is still grappling with the aftermath and turmoil left by the conflict. The rise of the Soviet Union and the persistent tensions between Eastern Bloc nations and NATO give rise to the Cold War.
1990s: Even though the Cold War concludes with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, anxiety and uncertainty continue to shape the global political landscape.
1950s: The advancement of technology and the remarkable achievements of science foster a widespread confidence in applying the scientific method to all disciplines, including art criticism and history.
1990s: While technology advances at an extraordinary pace, there is a growing skepticism towards science, highlighted by critiques from scholars like Bruno Latour.
1950s: Gombrich presents his theories during the 1956 Mellon lectures, which are later published as the book Art and Illusion in 1960. According to Dieter Peetz, its impact on the field of aesthetics is significant.
1990s: Dieter Peetz recognizes Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Works and Worlds of Arts (1980) for its "innovative power and imaginative scope" for those engaged in philosophical aesthetics at the end of the twentieth century.
1950s: Literary critics known as the "New Critics" evaluate a text based on its "universal significance." This theoretical approach suggests that a text's meaning and value are embedded within the text itself, transcending cultures and eras, and thus remain independent of context.
1990s: Reader response critics, drawing from foundational work by theorists like Stanley Fish in the 1970s and 1980s, contend that there is no neutral reader and that a text's meaning emerges from a joint effort between the writer and the reader.
Bibliography
Sources
Alpers, Svetlana, ‘‘No Telling, with Tiepolo,’’ in Sight and Insight, edited by John Onians, Phaidon, 1994.
Bull, Malcolm, ‘‘Scheming Schemata: Pictorial Representation in Theories of E. H. Gombrich and Nelson Goodman,’’ in the British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 34, No. 3, July 1994, pp. 207–18.
Cash, Stephanie, and David Ebony, Obituary for E. H. Gombrich, in Art in America, Vol. 90, No. 1, January 2002, p. 134.
Cunliffe, Leslie, ‘‘Gombrich on Art: A Social-Constructivist Interpretation of His Work and Its Relevance to Education,’’ in Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 32, No. 4, Winter 1998, pp. 61–77.
Fish, Stanley, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities, Harvard University Press, 1980.
Gombrich, E. H., Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, Vol. 5, 2nd ed., Princeton University Press, 2000.
———, ‘‘The Mask and the Face: The Perception of Physiognomic Likeness in Life and Art,’’ in Art, Perception, and Reality, by Julian Hochberg, Max Black, and E. H. Gombrich, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972.
Goodman, Nelson, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1968, p. 10.
Turner, Norman, ‘‘Some Questions about E. H. Gombrich on Perspective,’’ in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 50, No. 2, Spring 1992, pp. 139–50.
Woodfield, Richard, ed., The Essential Gombrich, Phaidon Press, 1996, pp. 28–36.
———, Gombrich on Art and Psychology, Manchester University Press, 1996, p. 19.
Further Reading
Gombrich, E. H., The Image and the Eye: Further Studies in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, Cornell University Press, 1982. This companion volume to Art and Illusion explores ‘‘the perceptual basis of art, psychology, and visual phenomena.’’ Gombrich further elaborates on his theories in this book.
———, Meditations on a Hobby Horse, 4th ed., Phaidon, 1985. In this collection, Gombrich examines how the intended use of an image or object influences the interpretation a person derives from it. For instance, a broom remains just a broom until a child imagines it as a horse.
Preziosi, Donald, ed., The Art of Art History, Oxford University Press, 1998. Preziosi has compiled the fundamental theoretical texts that define art history as a field. Additionally, he provides informative introductory chapters for each section of the book.
