Lifelong Interest /anglais

by E.H. Gombrich, Didier Eribon

Text: French

Genres: Art, Art History, Nonfiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich, OM, CBE (30 March 1909 – 3 November 2001) was an Austrian-born art historian, who spent most of his working life in the United Kingdom.

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book full of flashes of insight rooted in material history. Early in the book he describes growing up in Vienna - 'people could not find jobs. It is one of the reasons they became learned.'

Gombrich offers a keen sense of artistic progress rooted in overcoming what went before, and in the philosophy, beliefs and materiality of an age. For example:
'people were afraid of magic, the idea of transforming someone's image was literally 'no joke'. So caricature could not come into being until magic had disappeared.'
or when discussing the 'reformation killing art in England' and the need to import artists as 'if the young find no chance of earning a living by becoming artists they will turn to other professions.'

He refreshingly attempts 'to find out what the repertory of the period' is. But he also talks about how the difficulty of range and complexity of techniques available in our times are leading to a higher proportion of bad art.

My favourite quote: 'It is precisely because I do not believe in the ideology of the avant garde that I am convinced that there are many good artists working in many different idioms who form a kind of 'underground' of art, making a modest living without attracting the attention of the media.'

[Alessio]

A leisurely read with many interesting anecdotes, several involving Latin epistles, which twentieth-century expatriate academics seem all too happy to exchange. I learned that Gombrich was the student of Julius von Schlosser, who investigated the "conceptual image (Gedankenbild)" in medieval art. Gombrich would later develop and reformulate this concept as "schemata" (or the "repertory of the period") in Art and Illusion, which was initially titled The Visible World and the Language of Art, before his publisher rejected it for being too long a title.

The interviews also cover Popper's deep influence on Gombrich -- Popper apparently started out writing his doctoral thesis on the psychology of thinking, before becoming a philosopher of science/historian -- and Popper's idea of situational logic, the reconstruction of the situation, available choices, and historical limitations to understand why an agent made a certain choice. Gombrich also recapitulates his antipathy to the Panofskian idea of the Renaissance as the expression of a specific spirit -- no to all Geists! It was quite funny how, in response to a question about the absence of a definitive Gombrichian method (as opposed to Panofsky), he said my method is common sense.

[Vivi Papadopoulou · Rating 4 out of 5]

"La vie serait insupportable si on ne pouvait jamais s'évader vers les consolations du grand art. Il faut vraiment plaindre ceux qui n'ont pas de contact avec cet héritage du passé. Il nous faut être très reconnaissants de pouvoir écouter Mozart ou regarder Velasquez et très tristes pour ceux qui ne le peuvent pas" E.H.Gombrich