Ernst Hans Joseph Gombrich (1909–2001), a British writer and teacher of Austrian descent, wrote a textbook that was one of the most fundamental in this field. The book, reprinted more than 15 times and translated into 33 languages, including Chinese, introduced students from all over the world to European art history.
His History of Art was successful partly because it was accessible and philosophical. It also contained many of his new, original ideas about the nature of art, which the author subsequently developed in his many further works. A man whose curiosity and interests ranged from ancient Greek sculpture to teddy bears, Gombrich was an influential educator in both the UK and the United States and was generally considered one of the most perceptive thinkers of his time.
Childhood
The biography of Ernst Gombrich was very rich. He was born in Vienna (Austria) on March 30, 1909. His family was of Jewish origin, although it adopted the Protestant faith. His father, Carl, was a lawyer and official in the Austrian Bar Association. His interest in art may have been inherited from his mother Leoni, who studied music with composer Anton Bruckner and turned over the pages of notes for the even greater Viennese composer Johannes Brahms. Ernst Gombrich himself became a good cellist. Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud was a family friend.
The First World War affected the financial situation of the family. Allied border control after the war led to widespread famine in Vienna; Ernst Gombrich and his sister were sent under the auspices of the British charity organization Save the Children for nine months to the family of a Swedish carpenter who made coffins.
Study
After returning to Vienna, he studied at a secondary school called Theresianum, suffering from the impatience of his classmates, because studying was too easy for him, while he himself learned a lot. He was interested in art from the very beginning and wrote a large essay on the history of art back in high school, but his interest covered various subjects.
At the University of Vienna, he studied with one of the most influential founders of the history of contemporary art, Julius von Schlosser. He wrote a dissertation on Italian sixteenth-century artist Giulio Romano, Michelangelo's successor, and he had the gift of explaining art to young people. Ernst Gombrich believed that the features of works of art were the result of the efforts of artists related to solving problems characteristic of their own situations, and not the vague spirit of the times or features of historical development. This approach was to be central to Gombrich's mature work on art. He obviously loved to write for children; his first book, published in 1936, was called Weltgeschichte fĂĽr Kinder (World History for Children). She has been translated into several languages.
Escape from Austrian Fascism
In 1936, he married pianist Ilse Heller, they had a son, Richard, who became a Sanskrit professor. Ernst Gombrich at that time could already see that the conversion of his parents to Protestantism means nothing to the new fascist government of Austria. He left the country, finding a job as a research fellow at the Warburg Institute in London, a private art library that moved its collections from Germany to England, as cultural life in Germany under the Nazi regime deteriorated significantly. In 1938, he was able to help his parents escape from Austria. In the same year, he began teaching art history lessons at the Curto Institute in London, and began writing a book about a caricature with fellow art historian Ernst Chris. The book was never published, but it was at this time that he began to use the name E.H. Gombrich, as he was annoyed by the double Ernst, which was supposed to appear on the cover page.
With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Gombrich began serving his new country at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), translating German broadcasts for intelligence purposes. He remained in that post until the end of the war in 1945, using this work as a way to learn to write good English, and when Adolf Hitler committed suicide, Gombrich personally handed the news to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
A look at art
After the war, he returned to the Warburg Institute and resumed work on the book, which became the “History of Art”. Ernst Gombrich began writing it in 1937 in response to an order from the publisher Weltgeschichte für Kinder, and initially targeted young readers. However, the author’s clear, accessible style turned out to be ideal for students of all ages. The book "History of Art" was published in 1950 by Feydon. He did not write it with his own hand, but dictated to the secretary. “In fact, art does not exist,” the writer began. “There are only artists.”
The author meant that art was the result of the efforts of artists to solve specific problems at a particular time. He was not interested in considering art as an eternal pursuit of beauty. “If you try to articulate the principle of beauty in art, someone can show you a counterexample,” he said, quoting the Times London newspaper. And he never collected art. He also did not see it as an expression of some vague spirit of the times. Sometimes he can connect art with philosophical ideas, but only in a very specific way. Instead, Gombrich considered situations in which specific works of art were created: who ordered them, where they should be placed, what they had to achieve, and what technical difficulties the artist had as a result of these factors.
University professor
Ernst Gombrich's “Art History” has always attracted critics. He had little sympathy for contemporary art with its emphasis on formal principles and its relentless innovation, and he did not deeply explore the art of a non-Western world. This book, however, produced a new generation of students with a fresh understanding of familiar paintings, and his academic career quickly went uphill after its publication. Keeping in touch with the Warburg Institute (later part of the University of London), in 1959 he became its director. But he also had experience as a professor of art history at Oxford (1950–53) and Cambridge (1961–63), as well as at Cornell University in New York State (1970–77). In addition, he held numerous visiting lectures. From 1959 until his retirement in 1976, he served as professor of the history of classical tradition at the University of London.
Main ideas
In public lectures, such as the prestigious Mellon series of lectures he gave in Washington, DC, in 1956, the eminent art theorist did not simply seek to make interesting presentations. He considered them as a reason for serious reflection and took the opportunity to formally develop some ideas about art and psychology that underlie the history of art. Many of Gombrich's books were revised versions of the lectures he gave. “Art and Illusion” (1960), one of the most famous, was based on Mellon's 1956 lectures, and it examined how important convention is in the perception of works of art. Gombrich argued that artists can never simply draw or draw what they see, but depend on representations based on expectations received from what the audience has already seen.
In his lectures and writings, Gombrich expanded his psychological ideas. In subsequent years, he liked to use examples of drawings of people who were conditionally sent in unmanned aerial vehicles around the Universe in order to communicate something about people and their place in space to any alien creatures. Any such alien, Gombrich pointed out, would not have a frame of reference for interpreting rough drawings of people that they could find: if they did not have human hands, they would, for example, think that a woman whose hand was depicted on one of the drawings, actually had claws. Gombrich applied the same reasoning at a more specific level to well-known paintings and to the assumptions that the audience made when they examined them. He was delighted with new forms of presentation that depended on representative assumptions, and he once wrote an essay on teddy bears, indicating that they were characteristic of a modern phenomenon.
Literary activity
Some of Gombrich’s later books, such as The Weapon Caricature (1963) and Shadows: A Description of Cast Shadows in Western Art (1996), addressed specific topics in his more general field of ideas about psychology and representation. Other books were collections of essays and speeches on various topics; Some of the more widely read included Horse Meditation - Hobbies and Other Essays in Art Theory (1963), Image and Eye: Further Research in Image Psychology (1981), and Themes of Our Time: Learning Issues and art ”(1991). Between 1966 and 1988, he also wrote a series of four volumes, “Studies in Renaissance Art,” and throughout his life maintained an interest in the art of the ancient world.
The era of modernity
Despite the support of his ideas on modern psychological science, Gombrich cannot be called a supporter of modern art. One of his most widely read articles appeared in Atlantic magazine in 1958; he called it Vogue of Abstract Art (Fashion for Abstract Art), but the editors gave it a more provocative title, The Tyranny of Abstract Art. He did not like what he regarded as preoccupation with the novelty of twentieth-century art, and he devoted the book “Ideas of Progress and Their Impact on Art” to the question of art and its connection with ideologies generated by technological changes. However, Gombrich was never categorized as strict conservative, and he defended some contemporary artists, including the semi-abstract British sculptor Henry Moore.
In any case, he lived long enough to see how the visual arts again come to the fore. Gombrich remained active in the last years of his life, continued to write and lecture, despite the deterioration of health. He died in London on November 3, 2001, he had enough ready-made ideas on his desk to publish the posthumous volume “Preference for the primitive: episodes in the history of Western taste and art”. By that time, about two million copies of Art History were sold. Gombrich’s intellectual heritage was enormous, it extended to art history lessons in numerous public colleges, where the teacher could point out some distortion of reality in the famous painting and ask the students present why the artist could do it this way.
Ernst Gombrich awards and prizes
An outstanding art critic was the commander of the Order of the British Empire (1966); holder of the British Order of Merit (1988) and the Vienna Gold Medal (1994). In addition, he is a laureate of the Erasmus Prize (1975), the Ludwig Wittgenstein Prize (1988) and the Goethe Prize (1994).