Sir Ernst Gombrich | |
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| Born | (1909-03-30)30 March 1909 Vienna,Austria-Hungary |
| Died | 3 November 2001(2001-11-03) (aged 92) London, England |
| Alma mater | University of Vienna (PhD, 1933) |
| Occupation | Art historian |
| Notable work | The Story of Art |
Sir Ernst Hans Josef GombrichOM CBE FBA (/ˈɡɒmbrɪk/;German:[ˈgɔmbʁɪç]; 30 March 1909 – 3 November 2001) was an Austrian-bornart historian who, after settling in England in 1936,[1] became anaturalised British citizen in 1947[2] and spent most of his working life in the United Kingdom.
Gombrich was the author of many works of cultural history and art history, most notablyThe Story of Art, a book widely regarded as one of the most accessible introductions to the visual arts,[3] andArt and Illusion,[4] a major work in the psychology of perception that influenced thinkers as diverse asCarlo Ginzburg,[5]Nelson Goodman,[6]Umberto Eco,[7] andThomas Kuhn.[8]
The son of Karl Gombrich and Leonie Hock, Gombrich was born in Vienna,Austria-Hungary, into an assimilated upper middle class family of Jewish origin who were part of a sophisticated social and musical milieu. His father was a lawyer and former classmate ofHugo von Hofmannsthal and his mother was a distinguished pianist who graduated from theVienna Conservatoire with the School's Medal of Distinction.
At the Conservatoire she was a pupil of, amongst others,Anton Bruckner. However, rather than follow a career as a concert pianist (which would have been difficult to combine with her family life in this period) she became an assistant ofTheodor Leschetizky. She also knewArnold Schoenberg,Gustav Mahler,Hugo Wolf andJohannes Brahms.[9]
Rudolf Serkin was a close family friend.Adolf Busch and members of the Busch Quartet regularly met and played in the family home. Throughout his life Gombrich maintained a deep love and knowledge of classical music. He was a competent cellist and in later life at home in London regularly played the chamber music of Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven and others with his wife and his elder sister Dea Forsdyke, a concert violinist.[citation needed]
Gombrich was educated at theTheresianum and at theUniversity of Vienna, where he studied art history underHans Tietze,Karl Maria Swoboda [de],Julius von Schlosser andJosef Strzygowski, completing a PhD thesis on the Mannerist architecture ofGiulio Romano, supervised by Von Schlosser. Specialised in caricature, he was invited to helpErnst Kris, who was then keeper of decorative arts at theKunsthistorisches Museum, on his graduating in 1933.[10]
In 1936, he married Ilse Heller (1910–2006), a pupil of his mother, and herself an accomplished pianist. Their only child, the IndologistRichard Gombrich, was born in 1937. They had two grandchildren: the educationalistCarl Gombrich, (b. 1965) and Leonie Gombrich (b. 1966), who is his literary executor.[11]
After publishing his first bookA Little History of the World in German in 1936, written for children and adolescents, and seeing it become a hit only to be banned by the Nazis for pacifism, he fled to Britain in 1936 to take up a post as a research assistant at theWarburg Institute,University of London.
During World War II, Gombrich worked for theBBC World Service, monitoring German radio broadcasts. When in 1945 an upcoming announcement was prefaced by the Adagio ofBruckner'sseventh symphony, written forRichard Wagner's death, Gombrich guessed correctly thatAdolf Hitler was dead and promptly broke the news toChurchill.[12]
Gombrich returned to the Warburg Institute in November 1945, where he became Senior Research Fellow (1946), Lecturer (1948), Reader (1954), and eventually Professor of the History of the Classical Tradition and director of the institute (1959–76). He was elected aFellow of the British Academy in 1960, appointedCommander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the1966 New Year Honours,[13]knighted in the1972 Birthday Honours,[14] and appointed a member of theOrder of Merit in 1988.[15] He continued his work at the University of London until close to his death in 2001. He was the recipient of numerous additional honours, includingGoethe Prize 1994 andBalzan Prize in 1985 for History of Western Art.[citation needed]
Gombrich was close to a number of Austrianémigrés who fled to the West prior to theAnschluss, among themKarl Popper (to whom he was especially close),Friedrich Hayek andMax Perutz. He was instrumental in bringing to publication Popper's magnum opusThe Open Society and Its Enemies. Each had known the other only fleetingly in Vienna, as Gombrich's father served his law apprenticeship with Popper's father. They became lifelong friends in exile.[citation needed]
Gombrich remarked that he had two very different publics: amongst scholars he was known particularly for his work on theRenaissance and the psychology of perception, but also his thoughts on cultural history and tradition; to a wider, non-specialist audience he was known for the accessibility and immediacy of his writing and his ability to present scholarly work in a clear and unfussy manner.
Gombrich's first book, and the only one he did not write in English, wasEine kurze Weltgeschichte für junge Leser ("A short history of the world for young readers"), published in Germany in 1936. It was very popular and translated into several languages, but was not available in English until 2005, when a translation of a revised edition was published asA Little History of the World. He did most of this translation and revision himself, and it was completed by his long-time assistant and secretary Caroline Mustill and his granddaughter Leonie Gombrich after his death.[16]
The Story of Art, first published in 1950 and currently in its 16th edition, is widely regarded as one of the most accessible introductions to the history of visual arts. Originally intended for adolescent readers, it has sold millions of copies and been translated into more than 30 languages.
Other major publications includeArt and Illusion (1960), regarded by critics to be his most influential and far-reaching work, and the essays gathered inMeditations on a Hobby Horse (1963) andThe Image and the Eye (1981). Other important books areAby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (1970),The Sense of Order (1979) andThe Preference for the Primitive (posthumously in 2002). The complete list of his publications,E. H. Gombrich: A Bibliography, was published by Joseph Burney Trapp in 2000.
When Gombrich arrived in England in 1936, the discipline of art history was largely centred aroundconnoisseurship. Gombrich, however, had been brought up in the Viennese culture ofBildung[9] and was concerned with wider issues of cultural tradition and the relationship between science and art. This latter breadth of interest can be seen both in his working relationship with the Austrian psychoanalyst and art historian,Ernst Kris, concerning the art ofcaricature[17] and his later books,The Sense of Order (1979) (in which information theory is discussed in its relation to patterns and ornaments in art) and the classicArt and Illusion (1960).[18]
It was inArt and Illusion that he introduced the ideas of 'schemata', 'making and matching', 'correction' and 'trial and error'[19] influenced by 'conjecture and refutation', in Popper's philosophy of science. In Gombrich's view, the artist compares what he has drawn or painted with what he is trying to draw/paint, and by a 'feedback loop' gradually corrects the drawing/painting to look more like what he is seeing. The process does not start from scratch, however. Each artist inherits '"schemata" that designate reality by force of convention'.[20] These schemata, plus the techniques and works of previous masters, are the starting points from which the artist begins her own process oftrial and error.
The philosophical conceptions developed by Popper for a philosophy of science meshed well with Gombrich's ideas for a more robust explanation of the history of art. Gombrich had written his first major workThe Story of Art in 1950, ten years beforeArt and Illusion. The earlier book has been described as viewing the history of art as a narrative moving 'from what ancient artists "knew" to what later artists "saw"'.[22] And as Gombrich was always more concerned with the individual rather than mass movements (the famous first line ofThe Story of Art is 'There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists'[23]), he saw the use of scientific and psychological explanations as key to understanding how these individual artists 'saw', and how they built upon the traditions they had inherited and of which they were a part. With the dialectics of making and matching, schema and correction, Gombrich sought to ground artistic development on more universal truths, closer to those of science, than on what he regarded as fashionable or vacuous terms such as 'zeitgeist' and other 'abstractions'.[24]
Gombrich's contribution to the study ofRenaissance art began with his doctoral dissertation onmannerism. In this he argues that the work ofGiulio Romano, at thePalazzo del Tè, was not the work of a decadent Renaissance artist but rather showed how the painter responded to the demands of a patron 'eager for fashionable novelty'.[25]
The four-volume seriesStudies in the Art of the Renaissance (1966) comprises the volumesNorm and Form;Symbolic Images;The Heritage of Apelles; andNew Light on Old Masters, and made a major contribution to the study ofsymbolism in the work of this period.
Gombrich was a great admirer ofLeonardo da Vinci and wrote extensively on him, both in these volumes and elsewhere.[26]
Gombrich has been called 'the best known art historian in Britain, perhaps in the world'[27] and also 'one of the most influential scholars and thinkers of the 20th century'.[28]
In October 2014 anEnglish Heritageblue plaque for Gombrich was unveiled by sculptorAntony Gormley at 19 Briardale Gardens,Hampstead, alongside SirPeter Bazalgette, chair of theArts Council and blue plaque panel member,Richard Gombrich and the art historian ProfDavid Freedberg. The plaque reads: "E. H. Gombrich (1909 – 2001) Art Historian lived here 1952 to 2001." Gormley lived as a child a couple of doors down from the house.[29]
Gombrich was sensitive to the criticism that he did not like modern art and was obliged to defend his position on occasion.[12] He has also been criticised[by whom?] for taking what is now viewed as aeurocentric—not to say neo-colonialist—view of art, and for not including female artists in much of his writing onWestern art. His answer to the latter was that he was writing a history of art as it was, and that women artists did not feature widely in the West before the 20th century. He admired 20th-century female artists such asBridget Riley, whose work was included in a revised edition ofThe Story of Art.
While several works of Gombrich (especiallyArt and Illusion in 1960) had enormous impact on art history and other fields,[4] his categorical attacks onhistorism have been accused (byCarlo Ginzburg) of leading to "barren" scholarship;[30] many of his methodological arguments have been superseded by the work of art historians likeSvetlana Alpers andMichael Baxandall.[31]
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