Gombrich

Gombrich’s fame as an art historian rested upon his popular book The Story of Art but he didn’t see himself as a professional art historian. At the Warburg Institute, where he worked, he asserted his identity as a historian of Italian Renaissance culture and denied any attachment to academic art history. His publications take the form of a commentary on academic art historical practice, in the Viennese tradition of the Kunstgeschichtliche Anzeigen and Kritische Berichte. Many of the problems that he addressed originated in the milieu of Julius von Schlosser’s ‘Vienna School of Art History’. He was hostile to grand theories and master narratives and adopted a piecemeal approach to their critique. Although he wrote in a plain style, his thought was far from plain as it was embedded in a network of problems foreign to Anglophone scholarship. His work was profoundly alien to his English colleagues and frequently misunderstood.

Ernst Kris, Otto Kurz, La Légende de l’artiste, avec une préface de Ernst Gombrich, traduit de l’allemand et de l'anglais par Laure Cahen-Maurel, Paris, Editions Allia, 2010.

Ernst Kris et Otto Kurz, deux représentants d’une histoire de l’art se réclamant en partie de l’école de Warburg, s'intéressent ici aux mythes qui entourent la figure de l’artiste, faisant de ce dernier aussi bien l’égal de Dieu, dont le talent aurait surgi ex nihilo, qu’un demi-fou. Recensant les anecdotes et légendes stéréotypées typiques des biographies d’artistes, de l’antiquité à l’âge moderne, de l’Orient à l’Occident, de Giotto à Mignard, en passant par Van Eyck, Le Greco ou encore Giorgione, l’ambition du livre est de faire entrevoir le lien qu’il y a entre les représentations que nous nous faisons du génie et les invariants de la psyché humaine, éclairés par la discipline encore naissante de la psychanalyse.

The paper is the contribution approach to interpretations of Ernst Gombrich's contribution to the understanding of modern fine art. The basis of the paper stems out from knowledge of domestic and foreign interpretations of Gombrich's art history concept (Bakoš, Mikš, Kesner, Hříbek, Elkins etc.). The main hypothesis of the paper is idea that Gombrich's posthumously published work The Preference for the Primitive (2002) is, in spite of legitimate critiques on the part of contemporary art historians, not solely contribution to the primitivism phenomenon, but also to the understanding of modern art by its own historical perspective.

Il libro raccoglie per la prima volta alcuni saggi mai prima tradotti in italiano composti dal grande storico e critico d’arte E. H. Gombrich nell’arco di quasi mezzo secolo. Il filo che li lega è il rapporto tra le immagini e le parole: le parole che accompagnano le immagini e quelle che noi usiamo per descriverle, le parole che designano i movimenti artistici e quelle scritte nei documenti che ci parlano di un’immagine, e così via. Un libro che ci insegna ad aprire gli occhi su quello che ci sta intorno.

The question I am concerned with is the relevance of the notion of progress in the artistic field. Does the notion of artistic progress apply to art and, in the case it does, in what sense and how? In order to answer this question I will discuss Ernst Gombrich and Arthur Danto’s view of artistic progress (§§ 2-3). Then, following the objections that the Spanish philosopher Gerard Vilar recently raised against Danto’s ideas on the end of art (§ 4), I will suggest a modest view concerning the requirements a theory of artistic progress must satisfy (§ 5).

Le opere di Pollock viste sotto la lente dell'area di studi della Psicologia dell'arte. Come cornice teorica si sono presi in esame, oltre a Lacan e Freud, anche le concezioni sull'arte di Nietzsche, Heidegger e Warburg, problematizzando i concetti di "sintomo", "pulsione", "rimozione" e "sublimazione" nell'ottica dello studio dei quadri del pittore americano.

Historians make use of “facts” to explain some phenomena, for including causes and effects or for supporting a thesis. In the history of the art, the "facts" are the material works and the historical sources. André Malraux was an eminent scholar who contributes to the discussion of this positivist paradigm. He developed, for the first time in history of art, a postmodern attitude. For Malraux the interpretations of the civilisations and their artistic products are unreliable and we have unconditioned trust about our ability to judge the past objectively. On the other side Ernst Gombrich suggests, against Malraux interpretation that part of the custodial task of the humanist is keeping alive our ability to perceive the work of art in a way that might continue to have meaning for us and preserve as well the original meaning that it had for those in its own time. In this article we make a cross-examination of two ideas about history. The point is, as Gombrich said (Diacritics, Vol. 1, No. 2, Winter, 1971, pp. 47-51: 48), «the involvement with the past which may be a romantic involvement usually comes first: somebody is fired by a style or a period because he identifies with it, and it becomes for him an important metaphor of an attitude. But if he is a scholar, a critical scholar, he soon will start to ask the question "what were these people really like?" And of course you can play the old skeptic and say "Well, how can we ever know? There is always something missing." That's Malraux's position isn't it?»

Recientemente ha sido publicada la traducción castellana de la obra póstuma de Ernst H. Gom-brich, La preferencia por lo primitivo: episodios en la historia del gusto y el arte occidentales, edi-tada en Londres en la primavera del 2002, un año después del fallecimiento del historiador. 1 Era una obra muy esperada, pues Gombrich había aludido en diversas ocasiones a la escritu-ra del libro que había de contener la exposición más completa y exhaustiva de sus análisis y reflexiones acerca de las sucesivas manifestacio-nes de la preferencia por los estilos denomina-dos primitivos en la historia del arte y del gusto en Occidente. Su interés por este tema fue cons-tante a lo largo de más de cuarenta años. Las referencias al mismo en su obra son numerosas. A los múltiples artículos y conferencias en los que examinó una serie de aspectos de naturaleza muy diversa vinculados a esta cuestión, se suman las alusiones directas o indirectas a la misma que aparecen en obras de carácter mono-gráfico tales como, Arte e ilusión o El sentido del orden. En La preferencia por lo primitivo, el historiador reelabora y completa, con la clari-dad y la prosa brillante que distingue todos sus escritos, un conjunto de estudios y de reflexio-nes en torno a este fenómeno que había tratado de forma dispersa en escritos anteriores. Cualquier lector familiarizado con los proble-mas centrales de la historia del arte sabe de ante-mano que la cuestión objeto de este libro, la evo-lución de la preferencia por los estilos o las obras denominadas primitivas, es decir, el papel ejemplar atribuido en la modernidad a las obras o los estilos no europeos o más antiguos, considerados, equi-vocadamente o no, más simples o elementales que Qu'est-ce que «le primitif»? Gombrich y La preferencia por lo primitivo Núria Llorens Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona nuria.llorens@uab.es los modernos, es un tema de una gran compleji-dad, porque alude a un concepto-el de lo primi-tivo-y a un fenómeno-el del gusto por lo pri-mitivo-con muchos matices y connotaciones, y susceptible, asimismo, de lecturas muy diferentes. En la esfera artística, el sentido de la palabra pri-mitivo y el significado que adquiere el fenómeno de la preferencia por lo primitivo a lo largo del tiempo varían tanto en función del contexto histó-rico y cultural en el que se formulan, que resulta difícil pensar en qué es lo que tienen en común las distintas formas artísticas y las múltiples orienta-ciones del gusto englobadas bajo este calificativo. Gombrich no ofrece en el libro una definición explícita del término primitivo. Pero si retrocede-mos unos cuantos años atrás daremos con una explicación del sentido que el historiador ha dado siempre al uso de este concepto. En una charla radiofónica emitida en 1979, ante la pregunta sobre qué entendía por primitivo, respondía: «Incluyo cualquier clase de arte al que se ha llamado primi-tivo en alguna época, en particular cuando el tér-mino se ha utilizado como un elogio.» 2 Desde este punto de vista, el campo semántico de la palabra primitivo es amplísimo. En el libro, el campo de aplicación del concepto abarca desde el modelo antiguo hasta el arte popular, pasando por el estilo gótico y el arte medieval en general, el arte del primer Renacimiento, las obras tempranas de Rafael, los estilos artísticos comprendidos bajo la catego-ría de lo sublime, las artes decorativas, el arte japo-nés y el arte africano. Tal como iremos viendo en las siguientes páginas, este empleo tan general o inespecífico del término primitivo genera constan-tes problemas. Por otro lado, a pesar de que el his-toriador obvia la dificultad que supone dar, de 1.

This paper considers the question of the relationship between Gombrich's analysis of the psychology of perceptual representation, as found in Art and Illusion, and his approach to iconological analysis, as found in Symbolic Images. Whilst he made use of Karl Buehler's Organonmodell der Sprache, he failed to apply it consistently. Consequently there is further work to be done on his projected contribution to the study of the linguistics of the image.

Caricature and comics are elastic categories. This essay treats caricature not as a type or aspect of comics but as a window through which we can view comics in relation to the broader European visual art tradition. Caricature is exaggeration. But all art exaggerates, insofar as it stylizes. Is all art caricature, since all has 'style'? Ernst Gombrich's classic Art and Illusion comes close to arguing so. This article conjoins critical reflections on Gombrich's discussion of 'the experiment of caricature' with a survey of art historical paradigm cases. It makes sense for comics to emerge from this mix.

1. This was originally written to be put on an online College Art Association forum, in the year following Gombrich's death. The idea was to collect responses, and possibly publish them. The project was abandoned by the CAA, and the paper is unpublished.

2. The paper was been completely revised for publication in a volume by Jan Bakos, "Relativism versus Universalism in the Age of Globalisation and Ernst Hans Gombrich: On the Occasion of the Hundredth Anniversary of E.H.Gombrich's Birth."

3. It was published in “Ten Reasons Why E.H. Gombrich is Not Connected to Art History,” Human Affairs [Bratislava] 19 no. 3 (2009).

4. It is also posted on the Gombrich website, under “Forum.”

5. There is an Italian translation, “Le ragioni per cui Ernst H. Gombrich non può essere considerato uno storico dell'Arte,” Estetica, 2010.

I will send an updated version on request.

[Revised March 2013]

Il corso intende introdurre gli studenti ai fondamenti dell’Iconologia, attraverso lo studio di alcuni temi-cardine come la sopravvivenza dell’Antico attraverso la cultura astrologica, mitografica e letteraria, la migrazione delle immagini, tanto profane quanto religiose, nello spazio e nel tempo, l’allegorismo e l’emblematica. Le lezioni e i saggi in programma daranno anche occasione di riflettere sull’opera, il lascito e i limiti critici di alcune tra le personalità fondanti del pensiero iconologico, da Aby Warburg a Erwin Panosky, a Ernst H. Gombrich.

Sale Monumentali, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venezia | giovedì 17 marzo 2022, ore 16.00 .

Presentazione dei volumi:
- Warburg e il pensiero vivente, a cura di Monica Centanni (Ronzani editore).
-Aby Warburg and Living Thought, edited by Monica Centanni and translated by Elisabeth Thomson (Ronzani editore).

Saluto di Stefano Campagnolo, Direttore della Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana.
Intervengono: Monica Centanni, Salvatore Settis e Bill Sherman.

Aby Warburg, fondatore di una nuova scienza della cultura, che restituisce parola all’immagine; figura di “intellettuale militante” (così Gertrud Bing), per il quale non si dà distinzione tra vita e pensiero; pioniere di nuovi metodi di ricerca che inventa macchine, nuovi ‘organi’ per attivare ed esercitare il sapere; architetto di spazi disegnati per essere arene del pensiero: la Biblioteca di Scienza della cultura (migrata da Amburgo a Londra nel 1933) e l’Atlante Mnemosyne, le imprese che costituiscono la parte più consistente della sua eredità.

I dieci contributi raccolti per la prima volta in questo volume, tutti fioriti in ambito italiano, tracciano in modo chiaro la linea del “pensiero vivente” di Warburg. Giorgio Pasquali, Mario Praz, Gertrud Bing, Arsenio Frugoni, Giorgio Agamben, Guglielmo Bilancioni, Alessandro Dal Lago, Gianni Carchia, Salvatore Settis, Kurt W. Forster, Maurizio Ghelardi: il dialogo polifonico, ravvicinato o a distanza, fra studiosi di formazione diversa, attiva un fascio di luce che illumina in modo inedito la personalità di Warburg e mette in risalto il profilo del suo lascito intellettuale.

La conferenza è disponibile sul canale YouTube della Biblioteca:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCesk4_I8FuO08GpqmnYJINg

Per leggere un estratto del volume (versione in italiano) vedi: "Warburg e il pensiero vivente" a cura di M. Centanni, Ronzani Editore, 2022.
https://www.academia.edu/82493547/ABY_WARBURG_and_MNEMOSYNE_ATLAS_Warburg_e_il_pensiero_vivente_2022_

To read an extract from the volume (English version) see:
https://www.academia.edu/82494171/ABY_WARBURG_and_MNEMOSYNE_ATLAS_Aby_Warburg_and_Living_Thought_2022_

Per ottenere il libro, consultare il seguente link:
To get the book use the following link:
https://bit.ly/RonzaniEd_WPV

[Abstract français ci-dessous]
Expressionnist portraits and caricature

There is a certain visual evidence which makes it tempting to link modern art and caricature. At least two art-historians have done so: Ernst Gombrich and Werner Hofmann. However, they nowhere develop their contention that caricature may have a link to modern, more specifically, expressionist art.
My more programmatic than exhaustive article aims at developing the relationship they hint at. I will argue that the surface resemblance is the symptom of a deeper connection between caricature and expressionist art.
More specifically, I will show that expressionist artists share a common goal with caricaturists: they want to show the deep nature of that which they portray. The seeming deformations or distorsions that appear in their works are linked to an ideal of realism: showing the otherwise invisible nature of people.

If this link existed, then it would be more plausible than has generally been thought that caricature plays a role in the development of modern art. I believe that realist aspirations along these lines are sufficient to explain how caricature came into being and that it is unnecessary to appeal to the idea that caricature opposes ideal beauty, that it is, in this sense, an anti-art, as Werner Hofmann and many others have suggested. This has  a historical implication: If the birth of caricature can indeed be linked to the will to unmask, then the Northern countries become candidates for the place of emergence of caricature again - for they have long been discarded precisely because they didn’t have the ideal of beauty which existed in Italy and it was thus suggested that they didn’t have anything to oppose to. And as long as caricature was defined as an anti-art, negatively rather than positively, it could only be born in Italy. But if it the visual deformations it displays is explained as an extension of the will to show reality, earlier Northern examples have to be taken into account as examples of caricature.

"Portrait expressioniste et caricature par Klaus-Peter Speidel

La tentation de relier certaines œuvres de l’art moderne à la caricature est grande. Au moins deux historiens de l’art – et non les moindres – n’y ont pas résisté : Werner Hofmann et Ernst Gombrich. Toutefois le rapprochement qu’ils opèrent n’est développé nulle part. Dans cet article analytique, qui se veut plus programmatique qu’exhaustif, j’essaierai d’élucider la pertinence et la portée de ce rapprochement. A partir de quelques éléments de définition et de la structure de l’activité figurative dans les domaines de la caricature et du portrait moderne, je tenterai de déterminer si la ressemblance de surface pointe vers un lien profond entre portrait caricatural et portrait artistique moderne. Si tel est le cas, alors la caricature joue sans doute un rôle clé dans l’avènement de l’art moderne.

J’essaierai de montrer que le lien entre art moderne et caricature est non seulement formel, mais que les peintres de portraits expressionnistes parta­gent des objectifs réalistes que l’on remarque déjà chez les premiers carica­turistes. Je montrerai que la « déformation » ou « distorsion » que l’on observe chez les uns et chez les autres est un écart par rapport aux normes de la peinture naturaliste, mais au service du réalisme [1] : la déformation de surface permet de rendre compte d’une réalité qui est moins apparente. Je crois que l’aspiration réaliste suffit pour expliquer le cheminement vers la caricature. On n’a pas besoin de faire appel à la beauté idéale comme l’autre qui serait nécessaire pour « l’invention » de la caricature."

Metaphors and comparisons are typical features of the ancient texts describing celestial bodies, and they can be treated as a part of a broader cultural practice of seeking analogies between earth and sky phenomena, inspired by the microcosm/macrocosm theory. To explain such a practice, we can refer to the modern theory of imagination as well, according to which appreciation of nature is based, among others, on the so-called “projective imagination”, transferring mentally images from terrestrial reality to the sky. One of the obvious instances of such an analogical thinking is “katasterismos”, mythic narration about the item placed in the heavens as a star or constellation.
It appears that among the objects in the sky described as a result of “catasterism” we can find some specimens of the jeweller’s craftsmanship (e.g. Ariadne’s Crown as Corona Borealis). This is, however, a specific situation; astronomical descriptions usually emphasise the brightness and perfection of the sky phenomena using the above-mentioned poetic devices associated with jewellery.
Most popular among them is the metaphoric epithet of “gold”, linked commonly with stars and the sun, but besides this, can be detected in the more original imagery in the works of Roman authors (e.g. the cosmos as a necklace). It is argued in the paper that this kind of astronomical description can be interpreted against the backdrop of the history of the “visual metaphors of value”, as they were defined by Ernst Gombrich.

"My friend, Gombrich". Being a Jew, a woman, and an art historian at the same time in the interwar period in Hungary. The social network of Anna Zádor and the influence of Vienna School in the Horthy era/ Zsidónak, nőnek és tudósnak lenni a Horthy-érában - tanulmány Zádor Anna művészettörténészről, a Wiener Schule magyarországi hatásáról, a Hekler- és Gerevich-tanszékek történetéről, a két háború közötti művészettörténet-írásról, a Franklin kiadóról,  Zádor Anna kapcsolatrendszeréről, a magyar zsidótörvények hatásáról a tudományos és irodalmi életben, Zádor Anna visszaemlékezései és más források alapján. (HU)

Keywords: Kapossy János, Kolozsvári Grandpierre Emil, Lesznai Anna, Komor András, Péter András, Wölfflin, Gombrich, Hans Sedlmayr, Dagobert Frey, Schlosser, Dvorák, Riegl stb.

Neste trabalho irá abordar dois assuntos sobre dois capítulos do livro História da Arte de Ernst H. Gombrich. Capitulo 26 que aborda o tema " Em busca de novos padrões " , no qual o artista está cansado da mesma arte, e que buscam inovação. E tem o capitulo 27 que aborda o tema " A arte experimental " , que aborda a necessidade de adaptar-se a arte do belo para a praticidade, tornando-se funcional para o cliente, deixando de lado a estética da arte. CAPITULO 26 EM BUSCA DE NOVOS PADRÕES

The following pages examine aspects of Gombrich’s impact on the practice of art history at the Warburg Institute which he directed from 1959 to 1976. The first section focuses on Gombrich’s ideas on the interpretation of images, the next two sections examine his impact on the direction he gave to the Institute in terms of appointments, of the teaching programme he set up and of the care and development of the two major research instruments in his care: the Warburg Library and Photographic collection.

The pdf of the article will be made available in March 2019, one year after the book launch.

This article revisits an earlier social scientific analysis of the thought of Rudolf Arnheim and E. H. Gombrich. Adding to the earlier analysis in terms of social ontology and historical development is an analysis of the sufficiency of perception to yield information about the world, both in ordinary and in artistic contexts. Gombrich held to an idea of perception as hypothesis testing, and it joins with Popper's philosophy in the deferred warrant of the perceptual image. Arnheim, instead, followed the Gestalt theorists to believe that each stage of perceptual experience was incorrigible according to the given conditions. Consequently, Arnheim felt confident addressing the essence of art, while Gombrich remained anti-essentialist. Ultimately, Gombrich's Popperian empiricism attenuates realism, whereas Arnheim's gestaltism seeks to build a bridge between ordinary and scientific observation.

This paper analyses the relationship between Edgar Wind and Gertrud Bing through a reading of their correspondence, in order to shed light on a crucial chapter in the history of studies on Warburg’s legacy. The rift between Edgar Wind and those representatives of the Warburg Institute who transferred to London marks a wound in European cultural history that has yet to heal.
Philological research is still needed to reconstruct this history, which is presently characterised by confusion and gaps. This article should be seen as a first step towards a comprehensive survey of the Wind–Bing correspondence preserved and filed at the Bodleian Archive in Oxford and the Warburg Archive in London.

"Master Narratives and Their Discontents" is a look at the major accounts of visual art, and especially painting, in the last hundred years. The idea is to collect and compare the most coherent and elaborated accounts of the shape of the twentieth century.

Chapter 1 is a survey of theories of modernism, including accounts by E.H. Gombrich, T.J. Clark, Michael Fried, Robert Rosenblum, and Clement Greenberg. The chapter considers different starting-points for modernism in painting: the eighteenth century, the French Revolution, the mid-nineteenth century, the generations of Cézanne and Picasso; and there is also a discussion of the uneven dissemination of Clement Greenberg's theories in different parts of the world.