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Art and Illusion, A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, is a 1960 book of art theory and history by Ernst Gombrich, derived from the 1956 A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts.
Dec 24, 2000 · Searching for a rational explanation of the changing styles of art, Gombrich reexamines ideas about the imitation of nature and the function of tradition. In testing his arguments, he ranges over the history of art, from the ancient Greeks, Leonardo, and Rembrandt to the impressionists and the cubists.
- Introduction
- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Key Figures
- Themes
- Style
- Historical Context
- Critical Overview
- Criticism
- Sources
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 ...
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-acquain...
Part 1: The Limits of Likeness
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 Co...
Part 2: Function and Form
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. Gombri...
Part 3: The Beholder's Share
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 i...
Gertrud Bing
Gertrud Bing was Fritz Saxl's assistant and a close associate of Gombrich. She is noted for writing the introduction to the Italian translation of Aby Warburg's papers.
Karl Bühler
Gombrich recalls in autobiographical writing that the work of Karl Bühler was an important influence on his own thinking, especially in Art and Illusion. Bühler was a professor of psychology in Vienna during the 1920s and 1930s. In addition, he was an early writer on the Gestalt theory of thinking, which worked its way into the theory of art through Rudolf Arnheim. Perhaps most important for Gombrich was Bühler's model of communication and his theory of language.
John Constable, an early nineteenth-century English landscape painter, was one of the first painters to consider science and observation in his understanding of painting. Gombrich devotes a chapter of Art and Illusion to Constable and his experiments with paint and light, noting that Constable remarked, "Painting is a science and should be pursued as in inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are...
Perception
One of Gombrich's most important themes in Art and Illusionis that of perception. Technically, perception is the process through which a human being gains sensory information about the physical world. Twentieth-century scientists and philosophers have been intrigued by perception and by the way the brain takes sensory information and transforms it into a meaningful picture of the world. For example, how is it that humans have depth perception? How does the brain translate the images on the re...
Illusion
Illusion is one of the most puzzling phenomena in the study of perception and by extension, the study of representational art. In the case of an illusion, perception is not dependent on how the receptors in the eye and brain react, nor is it dependent on the object being perceived. That is, a human being is able to make meaning from an image independent of the physiology of either the eye or the image. For example, when children see a picture of a duck in a book and are asked what they see, t...
Narration
Narration is the telling of a series of events, often in chronological order, and generally in a way that creates a story. Certainly, in his Story of Art, Gombrich creates a narrative that gives a sense of unity to the history of art. Likewise, in Art and Illusion, Gombrich's stated purpose is to "explain why art has a history." Although he begins with the nineteenth-century painter John Constable, Gombrich soon jumps back to early Greek art to begin his story of "making and matching." Gombri...
Metaphor
A metaphor is a figure of speech that expresses an idea through a comparison between two objects or ideas. In Art and Illusion, Gombrich uses language as a metaphor for art. That is, he suggests that artists develop a "vocabulary" of artistic schemata that allow them to build their images. But the schemata available in any historic period can constitute a limitation within which artists tend to work. He likens the schemata to a writer's vocabulary that both builds and limits the work the writ...
Topics for Further Study
1. Find several of John Constable's paintings. Demonstrate your understanding of Gombrich's analysis by applying his theories to the paintings you find. Write a short paper detailing what you note. 2. Research Sir Karl R. Popper's "searchlight theory." How does this theory coincide with Gombrich's approach to art? 3. Find examples of several optical illusions. Using Gombrich's theories, explain why the illusions deceive the eye. What accounts for our "reading" of the image in the way we do? 4...
Gombrich and World War II
Although Gombrich did not publish Art and Illusion until 1960, many of the ideas contained in the book had root in Gombrich's experiences in London during World War II. Critics and biographers alike note this fact, as does Gombrich himself in Part Three of the book. Gombrich developed many of his ideas about perception while working for the British Broadcasting Corporation in their Monitoring Services division. His job was to listen to and translate all radio transmissions coming out of Germa...
Compare & Contrast
1. 1950s: Post—World War II Europe is still recovering from the uncertainties and devastation of the war years. The growth of the Soviet Union and ongoing hostilities between Eastern Bloc countries and NATO lead to the Cold War.1990s: Although the Cold War ends with the breakup of the Soviet Unionin the 1980s, fear and uncertainty continue to dominate the international political scene. 2. 1950s: Growth of technology as well as the "miracles" of science lead to a general belief in the applicat...
The Significance of Art and Illusion
Critics are nearly unanimous in their assessment of Art and Illusion: they consider it to be the most influential work of Gombrich's life, and they consider Gombrich to be the most influential art historian of the twentieth century. Indeed, it is difficult to overestimate the significance of this work. Perhaps most important is its attempt to connect the appreciation of artistic creation with the scientific study of perception. Gombrich carefullybuilds a case that the meaning of a work of art...
When Art and Illusion was published in 1960, it was immediately hailed as a masterpiece. In an obituary appearing in Art in American shortly after Gombrich's death in 2001, critics Stephanie Cash and David Ebony provide a retrospective of Gombrich's work. They hail Art and Illusionas Gombrich's "most influential volume." They also note that Gombric...
Diane Andrews Henningfeld
Henningfeld is a professor of English at Adrian College and has written widely on contemporaryliterature for reference and educational publishers. In this essay, Henningfeld compares the role of the beholder in the theories of E. H. Gombrich with the role of the reader in the theories of reader response literary critics. Throughout his book Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, writer E. H. Gombrich compares painting to language. The comparison offers him a...
What Do I Read Next?
1. Gombrich's The Story of Art,published in 1950, remains the best selling work of art history ever written, with over six million copies sold by 2002. Gombrich masterfully shapes the history of art into a clear, chronological narrative. 2. The Essential Gombrich(1996), edited by Richard Woodfield, is a treasure trove of Gombrich's best writing. It includes excerpts from Gombrich's major works, interviews, journal articles, and musings. Woodfield provides cogent introductions as well as a val...
Alpers, Svetlana, "No Telling, with Tiepolo," in Sight and Insight,edited by John Onians, Phaidon, 1994. Bull, Malcolm, "Scheming Schemata: Pictorial Representation in Theories of E. H. Gombrich and Nelson Goodman," in the British Journal of Aesthetics,Vol. 34, No. 3, July 1994, pp. 207-18. Cash, Stephanie, and David Ebony, Obituary for E. H. Gombr...
Oct 5, 2012 · Art and illusion : a study in the psychology of pictorial representation : the A. W. Mellon lectures in the fine arts, 1956, National Gallery of Art, Washington : Gombrich, E. H. (Ernst Hans), 1909- : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.
IN HIS charming autobiography, the German illustrator Ludwig Richter relates how he and his friends, all young art students in Rome in the 1820’s, visited the famous beauty spot of Tivoli and sat down to draw.
- E. H. Gombrich
Jul 12, 2019 · Art and illusion : a study in the psychology of pictorial representation. by. Gombrich, E. H. (Ernst Hans), 1909-. Publication date. 1961. Topics. Art -- Psychology, Visual perception. Publisher.
Dec 15, 2000 · Searching for a rational explanation of the changing styles of art, Gombrich reexamines ideas about the imitation of nature and the function of tradition. In testing his arguments, he ranges over the history of art, from the ancient Greeks, Leonardo, and Rembrandt to the impressionists and the cubists.
- E. H. Gombrich
