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Art History Reviewed VI: E.H MA.DEC.AHR6.pg.proof.corrs:Layout 1 19/11/2009 10:10 Page 836 Art History Reviewed VI: E.H. Gombrich’s ‘Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation’, 1960 by CHRISTOPHER S. WOOD ‘MAKING PRECEDES MATCHING ’: with this famous formula, decade later Keith Moxey presented Gombrich as ‘the most the epitome of his Art and Illusion (1960), 1 Ernst Gombrich eloquent advocate’ of the ‘resemblance theory of representation’, proposed that artists, before they ever dream of copying what according to which ‘representation has something to do with they see before them, make pictures by manipulating inherited the imitation of nature’. Moxey then contrasted this view ‘schemata’ that designate reality by force of convention. At some with that of the philosopher Nelson Goodman, numbering point an artist compares a pictorial schema to direct observation him among ‘Gombrich’s critics’, who ‘pointed out that [. .] a of the world, and on that basis presumes to correct the schema. picture never resembles anything so much as another picture’. 3 This then enters the stock of available formulae until some later A reader who turns to Goodman’s book Languages of Art for artist holds it up to the world and ventures a further adjustment. further elucidation, however, will be surprised to find that the In this way art may come to have a history. Beholders, in turn, author mentions Gombrich not as his intellectual antagonist, but make their own sense of pictures by collating what they see on rather as a principal witness in his own conventionalist cause: the canvas with what they know about the world and with what ‘Gombrich, in particular, has amassed overwhelming evidence to they remember of other pictures. show how the way we see and depict depends on and varies with Gombrich’s account of the making of art as an experimental experience, practice, interests, and attitudes’. 4 and even improvisational process impressed many readers In Art and Illusion Gombrich makes a powerful case against beyond the academic discipline of art history. However, for two what Ruskin called the ‘innocence of the eye’ (p.296). Per - decades or more, many art historians have considered his name ception, in Gombrich’s account, is not a given but a learned a byword for a rationalist, Eurocentric and naively naturalist practice, involving an active construction of the world. Resem - approach to art with which they no longer would wish to be blance to reality is an effect generated by the interplay between associated. A forceful blow to Gombrich’s reputation was struck the expected and the unexpected. Pictures are ‘relational by Norman Bryson in his Vision and Painting: The Logic of the models’ of reality (p.253). Pictorial realism was a historical and Gaze (1983), an intricately reasoned critique of the quest for collective product, and hard-won. The artist is not free, but an ‘Essential Copy’ that has supposedly driven Western art and faces a limited array of choices (p.376). Cultures determine what art theory since Antiquity. Bryson argued that the picture, as a is possible (p.86). conventional sign, delivers not reality but only a coded message Such propositions inverted the conventional wisdom about about reality and that verisimilitude is nothing more than representation. Like his near-exact contemporary, Claude Lévi- ‘rhetoric’ that persuades the unwary viewer that he or she is see - Strauss, Gombrich was a ‘reverse thinker’. Lévi-Strauss argued ing things as they really are. Within the discipline of art history, that myths are made by combining bits and pieces of previous for at least a decade, Bryson’s polemic was highly influential. myths. Meaning does not precede, but rather follows, the His anti-naturalism was embraced by art historians who wished myth-maker’s bricolage . ‘Mythical thought [. .] is imprisoned in to modernise their discipline, bringing it into step with the the events and experiences which it never tires of ordering and development of critical theory and poststructuralism that by the re-ordering in its search to find them a meaning’. 5 Gombrich 1980s had already profoundly reshaped literary studies. too solved problems by turning them inside out. For example, The problem-solving model of the development of Western he pointed out that astrological associations do not explain art that Art and Illusion proposed left Gombrich, in Bryson’s view, character traits but create them: human nature adjusts itself, as it aligned with an unacceptable classical theory of representation: were, to fit the signs. 6 ‘so far from questioning the Whig optimism of that version, it Gombrich’s paradoxical argument is also homologous with in fact reinforces its evolutionary and teleological drive’. 2 After that of Thomas S. Kuhn, who in his The Structure of Scientific Bryson, one could almost be forgiven for thinking that the Revolutions (1962) described the paradigmatic, essentially social phrase ‘Essential Copy’, implying an endpoint to the process of basis of scientific knowledge. Just as Kuhn’s demonstration of the experimentation, was Gombrich’s, which it was not . Yet only a collective and conventional nature of scientific knowledge was a We are grateful to the Azam Foundation for sponsoring this article. played a similar role in Umberto Eco’s Theory of Semiotics , Bloomington 1 E.H. Gombrich: Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation , 1976, pp.204–05, a classic treatise that makes the most extreme case possible for New York 1960. Originally delivered in 1956 as the A.W. Mellon Lectures in the the conventionality of signs. Even iconic signs, or pictures, which would seem Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. to be related to what they signify in stronger than conventional ways, figure in 2 N. Bryson: Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze , Cambridge 1983, p.21. Eco’s analysis as the products of cultural convention. In making his case, Eco 3 K. Moxey: The Practice of Theory: Poststructuralism, Cultural Politics, and Art History , enlisted none other than Gombrich, citing his analysis of Constable’s recoding of Ithaca 1994, pp.30–31. the light effects in the English landscape in Wivenhoe Park (National Gallery of 4 N. Goodman: Languages of Art , Indianapolis and Cambridge 1976, p.10. Gombrich Art, Washington; 1816) . 836 december 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine MA.DEC.AHR6.pg.proof.corrs:Layout 1 19/11/2009 10:10 Page 837 E.H. GOMBRICH revelation for non-scientists, so too were non-art historians ‘bewildering’, as ‘conundrums’ or ‘experiments’, as art that had greatly impressed by Gombrich’s arguments. Kuhn stripped the ‘lost its bearings’. Cubism in Art and Illusion is dismissed as a ‘last scientific revolution of some of its aura by showing that scientists desperate revolt against illusionism’ (p.281). were driven by ambition and limited by force of habit. Gom - But Gombrich’s relation to modern art is more complicated brich, for his part, desanctified the contents of the great museums than this. He was a contrarian by nature and could not abide the by showing how the painters, even as they were aiming at ideal smug post-War consensus, among an educated elite, that abstrac - form or expounding arguments, were also solving local, prac - tion had vanquished figuration once and for all. By the 1950s tical, technical problems. Yet art historians, already familiar with abstraction had lost its revolutionary edge and had become the conventions of pictorial representation, were not taken by universally palatable. Critics across a wide ideological spectrum surprise, for this is the basic premise of the modern discipline of agreed that abstraction held out the promise of a new spiritual - art history, especially as it was formulated by the pioneering ism, whether austere or romantic, in the face of the brutal theorists and historians Konrad Fiedler, Heinrich Wölfflin and literalisms and the delusionary mythologies that had together Alois Riegl. ‘People have at all times seen what they want to see’, wrecked the century. The bourgeois amateur of art could con - said Wölfflin. 7 Art and Illusion echoes and amplifies this dictum. gratulate him- or herself for apprehending a modern art which, Further, Gombrich stands accused of reducing art to mere according to André Malraux, writing in 1949, ‘has liberated technology. Art, to an art historian, is self-evidently something painting which is now triumphantly a law unto itsel f’. 9 Even the made . The art historian is interested in the ways artists select and Thomist theologian Etienne Gilson, who delivered the A.W. recombine, contrive and construct, perhaps even add to reality. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts in 1955, one year before To speak of artists striving to match their fabricated worlds to Gombrich, proclaimed that painters could never again indulge in a real world is to render the making of art less a poetic activity ‘the easy pleasures of imitational or representational art’. Since and more a technology. Poesis or artistic creation, in many Cézanne, Gilson affirmed with satisfaction, painting had been modern theories of art, is compromised if it submits to practical forced to submit to a ‘cure of abstractionism’. 10 Gombrich did imperatives. Art-making, an activity no doubt less free than it not like the complacent tone of this, any more than did Leo pretends to be, is nevertheless taken to symbolise the freedom of Steinberg, who in 1953 reminded readers that the ambitions the imagination. Technology, by contrast, is a problem-solving of the major modern artists, including Manet, Van Gogh, process and does not claim autonomy. Cézanne and Matisse, had been ‘adequately summarized in To a certain extent Gombrich invited this reading of his Constable’s dictum which defines the goal of painting as “the work by distancing himself, in repeated comments throughout pure apprehension of natural fact’”.
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