Re: Eh Gombrich Art And Illusion Pdf Download
Deandra Schikora
Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, published in 1960, is one of the most influential books written during the twentieth century on the subject of art. Following the publication in 1950 of his incredibly popular book, The Story of Art, Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich consented to give the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1956. Those lectures became the book Art and Illusion. Critics generally agree that this volume, among Gombrich's myriad publications, is his most far-reaching and influential work. Gombrich continued to advocate many of the ideas put forth in this book throughout his life. Indeed, he not only revised the text and wrote a new preface for the second edition of the book published in 1961, he also wrote a new preface for the "Millennium Edition" published in 2000, in his ninety-first year.
In Art and Illusion, Gombrich poses this essential question: "Why is it that different ages and different nations have represented the visible world in such different ways?" Throughout the pages of the book, Gombrich attempts to address this question using science, psychology, and philosophy to help formulate his answer. At the heart of his theory is the notion of "schemata," that is, the idea that the artist "begins not with his visual impression but with his idea or concept" and that the artist adjusts this idea to fit, as well as it can, the object, landscape, or person before him or her. Gombrich calls this theory "making and matching."
While art critics and historians have developed new ideas about representation since the first publication of Art and Illusion, Gombrich and his ideas continue to be a mighty force. Thus, serious students of art and art history find Art and Illusion an important and necessary part of their education.
Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich was born in Vienna, Austria, on March 30, 1909, to Karl B. Gombrich, a lawyer, and Leonie Hock Gombrich, a pianist. Gombrich credits his intellectual development to the music in his home. Indeed, Adolf Busch, the leader of the Busch Quartet, was a frequent visitor to the Gombrich home. Leonie Gombrich was also well-acquainted with the great modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg and Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis.
Although the atmosphere in his home led to his development as a thinker, Gombrich did not follow his mother's footsteps into music but chose rather to study art history at Vienna University. Gombrich said that he made his decision because "art was a marvelous key to the past" (The Essential Gombrich). At the university, he studied with the great art historian, Julius von Schlosser. Another important influence in the life of young Gombrich was Ernst Kris, who asked Gombrich to help him write a book on caricature which incorporated the work of Freud.
The rise of Nazism in Germany, however, interrupted the project, and Kris encouraged his Jewish assistant to leave Austria. It was largely due to Kris's urging and his recommendation of Gombrich to the director of the Warburg Institute that Gombrich moved to London in 1936.
When World War II began, Gombrich served as a "radio monitor," working for the British Broadcasting Corporation as part of the war effort. His duty was to listen to and translate German radio broadcasts for the use of the military. With the end of the war, Gombrich returned to the Warburg Institute, becoming its director in 1959.
During the 1950s, Gombrich wrote prolifically and lectured widely. His introduction to Western art, The Story of Art, was published in 1950. Since that time over six million copies of that volume have been sold. In 1956, Gombrich gave a series of Mellon lectures in Washington, D.C., choosing as his subject "Art and Illusion." These lectures were later collected into the book Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960). Many critics consider this book to be the most influential of Gombrich's works.
Over the next forty-two years, Gombrich published more than twenty books and hundreds of journal articles. Indeed, J. B. Trapp compiled a book-length bibliography of Gombrich's work in 2000, and the list of publications filled more than one hundred pages. His last full-length book, The Preference for the Primitive, was published in August 2002.
During his lifetime, Gombrich received many honors and awards. Most notably, he was named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1966, and he was knighted in 1972. Gombrich died in London on November 3, 2001, at the age of 92. He is generally acknowledged to be one of the most influential art historians of all time.
In the introduction to Art and Illusion, Gombrich asks the question, "Why is it that different ages and different nations have represented the visible world in such different ways?" This is the question he attempts to answer in his book. First, however, he provides the reader with a critical account of the history of style and the psychology of representation. That accomplished, he turns to Chapter One, "From Light into Paint." In this chapter, Gombrich notes that the English painter, John Constable said, "Painting is a science." Like Constable, Gombrich believes that science is involved in both the creation and the appreciation of art. He explains the many ways that artists through the years have learned how to represent light in their paintings.
Chapter Two, "Truth and Stereotype," begins with a discussion of how a picture can be neither true nor false. By contrast, the caption of the picture can be so judged. Further, when artists undertake to paint pictures, they start not with what they see, but rather with an idea or concept, what Gombrich calls a "schema." The schema, Gombrich argues, is "the first approximate, loose category which isgradually tightened to fit the form it is to reproduce." Thus, in portraying a person, animal, landscape, or thing in art, the artist must have a starting point, for, as Gombrich states, "you cannot create a faithful image out of nothing." Furthermore, an artist will tend to look for "certain aspects in the scene around him that he can render. Painting is an activity and the artist will therefore tend to see what he paints rather than paint what he sees."
The first chapter, "Pygmalion's Power," covers the connection between the artist and creation. It is not, Gombrich argues, the artist's aim to make a likeness, but rather to create something real. In so doing, the artist particularizes, starting with an idea, say, of chairness, and particularizing this idea until it represents the chair that is the subject being painted.
The section continues with a description of how Greek art moves from a stiff rendering to more "lifelike" rendering. Gombrich asserts that this is a perfect illustration of the theory that making always occurs before matching. That is, an artist (or culture) begins with a schemata, which the artist then adjusts and corrects to make it ever closer to the appearance the artist wants the creation to have. Gombrich then moves to an exploration of "the basic geometric relationships that the artists must know for the construction to be a plausible figure." In so doing, he considers the Medieval and Renaissance "drawing books" which used geometric shapes as formulas for teaching drawing. These books, according to Gombrich, "form a reservoir of formulas or schemata which spread throughout Europe." He compares these books with basic vocabularies; in a very real sense, they provided artists with the building blocks of the language of art. For Gombrich, however, "effective portrayal" is only possible when the artist goes beyond the formulas and demonstrates a willingness "to correct and revise."
The chapters of this section focus primarily on the role of the viewer in the reading of an artist's image. Gombrich relates this tendency to what psychologists call "projection," wherein a person projects onto another person his own desires and personality. A beholder of art will likewise project his or her catalog of classifications onto the images created by artists. In this case, the artist creates and the beholder projects; both are necessary ingredients in the making of meaning.
In an important section of Part Three, Gombrich turns to "the perception of symbolic material," using his experience as a British Broadcasting Corporation monitor during World War II. He discusses how our knowledge and expectations contribute to what we actually see or hear. The greater the likelihood a given word will occur, the less likely we are to listen. In Gombrich's own words, "Where we can anticipate we need not listen. It is in this context that projection will do for perception." The beholder, in other words, closes the gaps through projection, the act of projecting the image he or she expects into "an empty or ill-defined area."
Likewise, incomplete visual images push the beholder into completing the image: artists provide the hints that the viewer must use to complete the image. Artists cannot represent every detail of reality, no matter how painstakingly they work. It is the creation of an illusion that allows the beholder to fill in the details. Gombrich asserts, "I believe that this illusion is assisted by what might be called the 'etc. principle,' the assumption we tend to make that to see a few members of a series is to see them all." Furthermore, the expectation of the viewer as well as the context of the image affect the meaning the viewer assigns to an image.
After recapitulating his stance on the power of interpretation, Gombrich next offers a brief history of perception, referring to Bishop Berkeley, John Ruskin, and Roger Fry. Gombrich argues that "all thinking is sorting, classifying." Further, after summarizing Ruskin's position, he rejects Ruskin's notion of "the innocent eye." For Gombrich, this term is impossible, for no human eye can be "innocent," that is, unaffected by experience and attitude. The eye is connected to the brain and the experience of the viewer, and the perception of any viewer will make meaning using that connection. For the painter, this process is deeply affected by his or her ability to view his or her subject in terms of the traditions of painting. Gombrich writes, "A painting, as Wlfflin said, owes more to other paintings than they owe to direct observation."
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