Art and Illusion by E. H. Gombrich

First published: 1960

Type of work: Philosophy/psychology/art history

Form and Content

While Art and Illusion as published is divided into eleven chapters and four parts, the lectures on which the work is based were symmetrical; the introduction is a full segment, similar in length to the chapters, and flows directly into a first part which has but two chapters of its own. The reader is informed that one could go directly from the introduction, titled “Psychology and the Riddle of Style,” to chapter 9, “The Analysis of Vision in Art,” which begins part 4 (the final part). Nevertheless, the intervening portions were integral to the whole when Ernst Hans Gombrich delivered the fifth annual A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., in 1956.

The book, which is volume 35 in the Bollingen series, has retained the lectures’ sequential progression, and the 320 illustrations of works of art or details from them that are included appear at appropriate points, as the lecturer would have employed them. In a fundamental sense, the book could be read (or the lectures have been heard) as an extended commentary upon a major painting in the collection of the National Gallery of Art: John Constable’s landscape Wivenhoe Park, Essex, painted in 1816. The enormous wealth of the context Gombrich provides for his commentary, however, moves one beyond the understanding of a particular painter and a particular painting to one important approach to the historical context of works of art.

Behind these lectures is history—of philosophy, of science, of psychology, of aesthetics, of materials, of techniques—so much so that it is appropriate to recall Art and Illusion’s subtitle: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, which on examination proves to encapsulate the book’s focal theme. The reader is reminded in the very brief “Retrospect,” by explicit references and generous quotations, that Gombrich had already published The Story of Art (1950).

In part 1, “The Limits of Likeness,” Gombrich makes it clear that neither observation nor representation actually imitates the real; light cannot be reduced to paint, anymore than it can be fixed on a retina. The complication is that what one sees is not what is out there, but what one had already learned to expect—the “adapted stereotype.”

These limitations, the concept of which derives from the interface between psychology and philosophy, take Gombrich as historian in part 2, “Function and Form,” to reconsider basic Western traditions as derived from the Greeks and to reflect upon the Greeks’ own departure from earlier Egyptian styles of painting. The process included stages that Gombrich calls “schema and correction”—a kind of “something is there” statement, but with the necessity of adjustment by trial and error until the image not only makes one see the world better but also elicits admiration for its own beauty. In that sense, the Greeks invented art and at the same time its criticism.

What Gombrich calls “schema” he relates to the Greek canon and medieval “universals.” Examining the history of early copybooks for artists in relation to vocabulary developments, Gombrich considers the psychological response of the human perceptive apparatus. By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this response had led artists to struggle against the inherited, traditionally taught schema, using a method that to psychologist-Gombrich is suspect: As he created, the artist would “try to forget” pictures already seen.

Following his look at these artists’ dilemma and effort at correction, Gombrich comes in part 3 to “the beholder’s share” in the success or failure of imaging. The artist does not really have to finish a work, if enough is done to suggest to the beholder what is to be seen. Still, the problem of illusion, which is another aspect of the level of preparation, must be faced: How much does one already know, and therefore see? “We can train ourselves to switch more rapidly,” according to Gombrich, “indeed to oscillate between readings, but we cannot hold conflicting interpretations.” Thus, he must move on to the ambiguities which the third dimension (space) places upon flat-surface representation.

Part 4, “Invention and Discovery,” considers artists’ tricks with space, time, light, texture, but most especially with “physiognomic expression”—the mysteries of the human face and its capacities to show levels of emotion, which, because they are fleeting, are particularly difficult for the artist to capture. There is a “splashing over of impressions from one sense modality to another” (synesthesia).

Such a sequence of thought brings Gombrich full circle to his introductory purpose (“why art has a history”) and the concept of style. In the interim, he has inverted Aristotle so that “nature imitates art,” at least through the intermediary of the human individual’s perception—the artist’s or the beholder’s. It was to preserve this particularity over against the claims of universality that Gombrich so eloquently lectured.

Critical Context

Gombrich was born in Vienna on March 30, 1909. His education was at the Theresianum and the University of Vienna, from which he received the degree of doctor of philosophy in the history of art. Gombrich was taught to think initially and academically in German with its special overtones; he came also in time and by choice to think in English with its contrasting undertones. In Art and Illusion, he pays dedicatory homage in a chronological listing to the memory of three teachers; under the second he wrote his dissertation.

To Emanuel Loewy, specialist in Greek sculpture and inscriptions, including especially those pertaining to artists, Gombrich ascribed, admittedly in the context of “the outlook of sense-data psychology,” “most of what is worth preserving” in “evolutionism.”

Julius von Schlosser, noted for the study of monastic architecture, early and later Renaissance art, and the history of musical instruments, and for the cataloging of the private and state collections of Austria, is acknowledged as the source of Gombrich’s recurrent interest “in the role of the type and even of the stereotype in tradition,” in “the use of ’precedents’ or ’similes,’ ” in the “conceptual image,” and ultimately in the “style” of an age.

Through Ernst Kris, a student of decorative art, especially sculpture, and of the psychology of art and the relationship of psychoanalysis to art, there was mediated to Gombrich that concern for the “psychological-philosophy” of Sigmund Freud, to which Gombrich comes back with some frequency for matters of aesthetics applied to illusion, perception, caricature, and the whole “psychology of pictorial representation.” Like Kris, Gombrich became a student of propaganda during World War II.

Gombrich became an art historian in the midst of a belligerent National Socialism and on the verge of World War II. His initial connection with the Warburg Institute dates from the beginning of 1936. Along with a variety of visiting lectureships, he retained that connection, moving with the institute to England; Gombrich eventually attained British citizenship and, in 1972, knighthood. Thus, he came to hold both a professorship of the history of the classical tradition in the University of London (from 1956) and the directorship of the institute (from 1959), until his retirement in 1976.

To understand Art and Illusion, one cannot ignore the enormous though indirect influence upon Gombrich of the institute’s founder, Warburg, whose many private papers and library notes Gombrich employed in his study Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (1970, second edition 1986). Indeed, at times in this work it becomes impossible to disentangle Warburg from Gombrich himself. The Warburg collection is essential to understand Gombrich; in its context lies the importance of Art and Illusion—a holistic treatise integrating works of art not only with their making but also with their comprehensive discussion.

Bibliography

Frankenstein, Alfred. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXV (April 3, 1960), p. 7.

Held, Richard. Review in The Yale Review. XLIX (June, 1960), p. 607.

Richmond, Sheldon Saul. An Evaluation of Gombrich’s Critique of Aesthetics, 1976.

Richter, P. “On Professor Gombrich’s Model of Schema and Correction,” in British Journal of Aesthetics. XVI (Autumn, 1976), pp. 338-346.

Wilkerson, T. “Representation, Illusion, and Aspects,” in British Journal of Aesthetics. XVIII (Winter, 1978), pp. 45-58.

Wilson, Judith Diane. E. H. Gombrich and Beyond: A Study of Ernst Hans Gombrich’s Views on Pictorial Imagery and of Their Implications for Identification of the Destructive Features of Pictorial Works of Art, 1974 (dissertation).

Yoos, George E. An Analysis of Three Studies of Pictorial Representation: M. C. Beardsley, E. H. Gombrich, and L. Wittgenstein, 1971.