Ben Sonnenberg is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Grand Street.

http://www.jstor.org
Ben Sonnenberg
E. H. Gombrich
Author(s): Arthur C. Danto
Source: Grand Street, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Winter, 1983), pp. 120-132
Published by: Ben Sonnenberg
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25006488
Accessed: 20-08-2014 06:13 UTC
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content
in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.
For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
This content downloaded from 84.205.227.38 on Wed, 20 Aug 2014 06:13:15 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
GRAND STREET
E. H. GOMBRICH
Arthur C. Danto
It has become the custom for those who write on the
thought
of the eminent art historian E. H. Gom
brich to
lay
a
tributary bouquet
at his feet before
pro
ceeding
to their diffident discussions.
Distinguished
for
his
scholarship
and honored for the
scholarly productions
in which it is
displayed,
he is treated as a kind of hu
manistic monument in his own
right
and accorded a
deference
rarely
bestowed in our
unrespecting,
decon
structionist
age.
In
truth,
apart
from reviews of his
books,
writing
about Gombrich has been
remarkably sparse,
but
even the critical silence seems a tribute
paid.
"Who of us
knows
enough properly
to
praise
or
appraise
Gombrich's
work?" asks David Carrier in a fine
synoptic
article in a
recent issue of
Leonardo,
almost
explaining by
the
rhetorical
question
the reflexive kowtow and the
meager
secondary corpus. Figures
of
comparable
stature in other
fields are Modern
Masters,
objects
of hermeneutical vir
tuosity,
so that scholars of the fourth echelon
ponder
interpretations by
scholars of the third echelon of read
ings by
masters of the Master. But Gombrich
appears
to
function more as a fetish to decorate with
recognitions
than as a thinker it is
especially urgent
to
understand,
and the
question
must therefore arise as to
why,
if the
thought
is so
transcendently thick,
the
response
in kind
is so thin?
It is
possible,
of
course,
that the awed silence can be
explained through
the fact that the
primary pool
of
anticipated
commentators is
composed
of
professional
art
historians,
and
these,
in contrast with the
visionary pio
neers in that
discipline,
have become
intellectually grudg
ing-cautious, specialized,
academical,
and
suspicious
of
the mise en
question
by
which
nearly every
field of
intellectual and
scholarly inquiry
has been racked in
recent
years.
Gombrich
truly belongs
in the
company
of
those visionaries
(bouquet!),
some of whom were his
teachers,
although
he
paid
his
professional
dues with
[120]
This content downloaded from 84.205.227.38 on Wed, 20 Aug 2014 06:13:15 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
ARTHUR C. DANTO
an
important
dissertation on
Giulio Romano and the
Palazzo del Te-one of the first
shaping
discussions of the
concept
of Mannerism as
exemplified
in its first and
greatest
monument.
Still,
his claim to wider attention
than his fine art-historical contributions in the
exacting
Warburg
tradition would have earned
him,
rests on
his
theory
of art
history itself,
a
theory
indeed as to
why
art has a
history,
a brilliant
question
to have raised
at all
(bouquet!),
and which drove him to seek for
answers in
perceptual
psychology
and in
postpositivistic
epistemology.
"I have tried to show
'why
art has a
history,"'
he writes in The Sense
of
Order
(1979)
of
what is
generally
acknowledged
to be his chief
work,
Art and Illusion
(1960).
"I found the reason in the
psychology
of
perception,
which
explains why
we can
not transcribe what we see and have to resort to a
method of
'making
and
matching.'"
The "slow
process
of
'making
and
matching'"
is the
counterpart,
in the
theoretical
history
of
art,
to the method of
conjecture
and refutation made central in the theoretical
history
of
science
by
Gombrich's own intellectual
fetish,
Karl
Pop
per.
Carrier's
question may
then be
rephrased
as: which
psychologists, philosophers,
and art historians know
enough
of one another's fields
properly
to
appraise
an
edifice of
thought
which
stands,
like a
three-legged
colossus,
with one foot in each? Since it must be
plain
that a
tripod
has not a
leg
to stand on if it has not
three,
the Gombrichian
synthesis
is
everywhere
vulner
able if it is
anywhere
weak,
and it is not
necessary
to
know as much about as much as he does to
bring
the
whole
thing
down. The
question
then is
why
those who
have ventured to write about him as a
thinker,
and not
just
to refer to him as
part
of the
sweep
of art-historical
scholarship,
should have muffled criticism
by apprecia
tion and
placed
him at an exalted distance which is
tantamount to intellectual indifference-as
though
in the
end the
thought
did not much matter? The cruel
answer,
I
think,
is that the
thought
in fact does not matter.
The connection between the
history
of art and
the
psychology
of
perception,
enunciated
broadly
in Art
and
[121]
This content downloaded from 84.205.227.38 on Wed, 20 Aug 2014 06:13:15 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
GRAND STREET
Illusion,
reappears
like a Gibsonian invariant in virtu
ally everything
Gombrich has written since. It is the
basic
generating thought
of all that he has
said,
and
though
he has had
opportunities
to
modify
it
through
the
many opportunities
he has had to
present
it,
it remains
very largely
intact in his most recent
publication,
The
Image
and the
Eye,
subtitled Further Studies in the
Psy
chology of
Pictorial
Representation
(Cornell).
There
are,
of
course,
many ways
in which
pictures may repre
sent-a
picture
of a man and then a
woman,
to use an
example
of
Lacan's,
on
adjacent doors,
segregates
the
sexes without either
image
much
looking
like those who
seek relief behind the
appropriate
doors,
and
operate
as
pictorial symbols,
to the
recognition
of which the
psy
chology
of
perception
serves no
particular explanatory
function.
Gombrich,
by
contrast,
is
primarily
and ex
haustively
concerned with
illusionistic
pictorial repre
sentation,
the manufacture of
images
which look like
what
they
are about because
they
have been manufac
tured to do
so,
and
beyond question
the
psychology
of
perception
has much to tell us as to how such illusion is
possible (illusion
is not the same as
deception).
The
kind of art Gombrich has so
tirelessly sought
to
explain,
and the
possibility
of whose
history
he has made his
main
problem,
is illusionistic art. Yet illusionism has not
been an artistic
goal
for some
while,
certainly
not in the
respect
at least in which
perceptual psychology may
be
of some
use,
with the
possible exception
of the short
lived
op-art
movement. And when I
say
that Gombrich's
thought
does not much
matter,
I mean that what he
said
has,
and can
have,
no considerable
bearing
on the
art or the
art-making
of our
times,
nor be of value to
those who
might
turn to his
writings thinking they
can
contribute to the
understanding
of the
baffling
art of this
century,
which seems so
resolutely
to have turned its
back on the
enterprise
of
making things
to match
per
ceptual reality.
In his
hugely
successful
History of
Art,
Gombrich
writes that there is no such
thing
as
art,
there are
only
artists.
(If
there is no such
thing
as
art,
there is
clearly
nothing
the
possibility
of whose
history
needs
explaining:
[122]
This content downloaded from 84.205.227.38 on Wed, 20 Aug 2014 06:13:15 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
ARTHUR C. DANTO
there will
only
be the lives of the artists to
write.)
I
think he said that because a
history
of art has to have a
concluding chapter
on
contemporary art,
and Gombrich
could see no
way
of
getting
a definition which included
it and the illusionistic art with which he feels so com
fortable;
and
perhaps
he found in the antidefinitionism
enunciated
by Wittgenstein
and his followers an
easy
way
out. It is too
easy,
since the
problem
is
only
shifted
from what is art to who is an
artist,
and a theoretical
response
to the art of our time
requires equipment
of
a
far different order than
perceptual psychology
or
Pop
perian epistemology,
a fact made vivid in the work of
Duchamp,
who must be credited with the
indispensable
discovery
that
something may
be an artwork and
yet
perceptually
indiscriminable from
commonplace objects
of
ordinary
life,
like snow shovels and
bicycle
wheels,
which have no status as art at all. Gombrich has denied
that all that counts as art for him is illusionistic art. He
wrote The Sense
of
Order to
prove
that he has a
long
and
deep
interest in ornament as well as
image-as
though
the
nonrepresentationality
of ornament had
any
thing
to do with the
way
in which modernist art is not
representational!
And when he has tried to address his
contemporaries,
it has been in terms
altogether
alien to
their
motives,
as
when,
for
instance,
he
praises
Rauschen
berg (faintly)
for
enabling
him to see
ravaged
surfaces
in the
surrounding
urban
blight.
It is
interesting
to com
pare
Gombrich with such art-historical intellectuals as
Meyer Schapiro
and Leo
Steinberg,
or for that matter
with Michael Fried and
Joseph
Masheck,
to restrict
myself
for the moment to writers who have an
identity
as
historians,
in contrast with Clement
Greenberg
or
Harold
Rosenberg.
Each is
primarily
a citizen of his own
age,
and their interest in the art of the
past
is
clearly
informed
by
their
struggles
to
comprehend
the art of
their
(of our) contemporaries.
When I read
Schapiro
or
Steinberg,
I have the definite sense of someone who uses
structures accessible
only
to a
very
modem
sensibility
to make discoveries
regarding past expressions,
and
which would be hidden until modernism revealed them.
Gombrich is the absolute
inverse,
an
essentially
nine
[123]
This content downloaded from 84.205.227.38 on Wed, 20 Aug 2014 06:13:15 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
GRAND STREET
teenth-century sensibility trying
to
apply, futilely,
what
it is
trendy
to call the Renaissance
Paradigm
to contem
porary expressions
for which it is almost
comically
in
adequate.
One
may
see these crossed
paradigms
in
Gombrich's
quite
uncomprehending
review of Leo Stein
berg's
book on
Michelangelo's
last
paintings-works
which of course fall
squarely
within the
period
illusion
ism
defines,
an
incomprehension
so
deep
as to raise the
question
of how useful the Renaissance
Paradigm
is for
understanding
even Renaissance
art,
if
Steinberg
is re
motely right.
Gombrich knows that there is more to art
than
optics,
and more to
representational
art than illu
sionism-the final
chapter
of Art and Illusion is "From
Representation
to
Expression";
but the issue is to what
degree perceptual analysis
is at all
pertinent
to under
standing
a work like
Michelangelo's
Doni
Madonna,
by comparison
to the
complexly
overdetermined strata of
interpretation Steinberg's contemporary
consciousness is
able to
bring
to that
painting.
Another
masterpiece,
Raphael's
Madonna della
Sedia,
is
given
an
impover
ished,
because
merely
formal and
perceptual, analysis
by
Gombrich. Here even the circular
shape
must
imply
that some
deep metaphor
is
being
transacted on which
perceptual psychology,
or the
procedures
of
"making
and
matching,"
must be silent. Gombrich understands the
eighteenth-century
frame of that
painting
better
by
far
than the
painting
itself.
(Indeed,
the frame which he
complained
in his lecture on that
painting
"all but killed"
the
picture
became the motif for The Sense
of Order!).
But even within the narrow circumference of illusion
istic art considered
illusionistically,
and
abstracting
from
all the
largely nonperceptual
factors he
may very
well
say
it
simply
has not been his task to
inquire
into,
there
is a
problem
of how
adequate
Gombrich's
analysis
has
been. In the remainder of this
essay
I shall restrict
my
self to that.
There is a
compelling body
of evidence in
support
of a
thesis that the
power
to
perceive pictures
is
innate,
and
that it cuts across the divisions between the
species.
The
perceptual psychologists Julian Hochberg
and his
wife,
Virginia
Brooks,
in a now famous
demonstration,
raised
[124]
This content downloaded from 84.205.227.38 on Wed, 20 Aug 2014 06:13:15 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
ARTHUR C. DANTO
a child to nineteen months in a
picture-free
environment,
notwithstanding
which,
the child
immediately applied
the
vocabulary
it had
acquired
in connection with ob
jects
to
pictures
of those
objects.
"In line
drawings,"
Hochberg
writes,
"the artist has not invented a
completely
arbitrary language;
indeed he has discovered a stimulus
that is
equivalent
in some
ways
to the features
by
which
the visual
system
encodes the
images
of
objects
in the
visual
field,
and
by
which it
guides purposive
action."
Chimpanzees,
of
course,
spontaneously sign
with
pictures
as
they
have learned to do with
things,
and in a recent
series of brilliant
experiments,
Richard Herrnstein has
shown that
pigeons,
working
with
photographs,
have
about the same
degree
of success in
sorting
them into
categories
as humans would
have, and,
by pecking, sig
nal
recognition
of
trees,
bodies of
water,
and individual
human
beings, faltering
at
boundary
lines at which we
would hesitate ourselves. There is a
strong presumption
that
pigeons
are "hard-wired" to
recognize
these kinds
of
things,
but that
they may
transfer their
gift
to
pictures
is
something
of a
surprise:
and the
power
extends
to
objects pigeons
do not
ordinarily
encounter:
they
can
pick
out instances of
fish,
though
fish and
pigeons,
on
Herrnstein's
estimate,
have not shared an environment
for
upward
of
fifty
million
years.
In the
essay "Image
and
Code,"
Gombrich cites a claim
made
by
the conventionalist
philosopher
Marx Wartof
sky
that the word
"dog"
was "neither more nor less
like the real animal" than a
picture Wartofsky (who
happens
to be a
good draftsman)
drew on the board. It
is nice to see what
pretends
to be a
philosophical position
collide with
psychological
fact,
and it is
fairly plain
that
had the
Hochberg
child been raised in a word-free en
vironment,
however rich in
pictures,
he would
hardly
have been able
spontaneously
to select the
right objects
as the denotations of words when these were
finally
introduced. Gombrich is
perfectly right
in
rejecting
Wartofsky,
or for that matter Nelson
Goodman,
on the
thesis that words and
pictures
stand to the world in the
same sort of conventional
relationship.
Adam
gave
names
to
things,
but
pictures
are
recognized.
So there is reason
[1251
This content downloaded from 84.205.227.38 on Wed, 20 Aug 2014 06:13:15 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
GRAND STREET
to
suppose
we are
dealing
with a
cognitive
skill to be
explained
with reference to the
way
we are
built,
and
it is
today
a matter of intense
experimental investigation
what the boundaries are of these
competences,
as well as
of
object-to-picture
and
picture-to-object
transfers which
are,
in the human case at
least,
the basis for
supposing
that
pictures designate
as words do.
Now the
parity
between
pictures
of x and x itself
is,
in
the case of
pigeons,
a matter of
categorizing,
so that the
same
recognitional powers
are exercised in
picking
out
a
picture
as in
picking
out two instances of
something
in
a
given category:
the two instances need resemble one
another to no
greater degree
than either resembles the
picture,
and we
may recognize
Peter and Paul
by
the
same cues
by
which we
recognize
a
picture
of a
man,
without our
believing
the
picture
to be a man
any
more
than we believe Peter to be Paul. Illusionism arises at a
different level.
Perhaps every
culture has discovered
and used
pictures,
but Gombrich
writes,
echoing
Vasari,
"Only
twice on this
globe,
in ancient Greece and in
Renaissance
Europe,
have artists striven
systematically,
through
a succession of
generations,
step by step
to
ap
proximate
their
images
to the visual world and achieve
likenesses that
might
deceive the
eye."
It is
very largely
to the
concepts
connected
up
in this sentence that Gom
brich has devoted his
thought: image, reality, genera
tions,
step-by-step,
and illusion-to the
making
rather
than
merely
the
perception
of
pictures,
and then
espe
cially
to the
making
of
pictures
"which
might
deceive
the
eye."
I find no
special explanation
in Gombrich's
writings
as to
why
artists in these two
periods
should
have
pursued
this
special program; though, interestingly
enough,
in "Visual
Discovery through
Art,"
he seeks
some
explanation
of
why
no one else has
pursued
it,
as
though
it were the natural
way
to
go.
I am also unclear
whether the
program
was
pursued
elsewhere but with
insufficient success for us to be able to
acknowledge
it
as a motive.
But,
to take a case he has examined
closely,
and on which he is almost
certainly
correct in
claiming
it a
discovery, fixed-point
perspective,
there is visual
evi
dence that the Chinese would have used it had
they
[126]
This content downloaded from 84.205.227.38 on Wed, 20 Aug 2014 06:13:15 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
ARTHUR C. DANTO
found
it,
since
they employ
mists and trees to break
up
lines which would look incorrect if
uninterrupted.
And
Alan
Tormey
has
recently
found evidence that the
Jap
anese realized what was
wrong
with their treatment of
space
when
they
saw Western
representations
in correct
perspective.
This
suggests
that both those cultures had il
lusionist ambitions
they
did not know how to
achieve,
since after all
they
used other
devices,
like
occlusion,
constancies,
aerial
perspective,
and the like.
Now it
may
have been a
matter of cultural decision to
sponsor image-making
which is
illusionistic,
without its
following
that it is a matter of cultural
decision,
or con
vention,
which devices are
optically convincing.
The
deployment
of
spatial
forms,
the uses of illumination to
define forms and the
relationship
between
forms,
are
genuine
discoveries in Western
art,
as much so as dis
coveries in
science,
and to a
degree
Gombrich is
justified
in
drawing
his
parallels
between illusionistic art and
natural
sciences,
construed as
producing
correct
repre
sentations of the world. And he is correct in
saying
that
it is a matter of
perceptual psychology
to
explain why
certain schemata of
pictorial representation
are
optically
convincing.
What
perceptual psychology
will not
explain,
however,
is
why
art has a
history,
so the internal con
nection he wants between the
history
of art and the
psychology
of
perception simply
will not hold.
At a famous
part
of the
Republic,
Socrates is made to
argue
for what are doubtless Plato's
views,
that the
artist is
caught up
in the
socially,
or
politically, danger
ous
activity
of
creating apparent things
that the
senses,
themselves
politically dangerous,
will take for real
things.
Socrates is at some
pains
to belittle this
enterprise,
as the
rhetorical contrast between
"appearance"
and
"reality"
al
ready
tries to do. It is less
frequently recognized
as
part
of the rhetoric of minimization that Socrates claims it is
easy
to make such
appearances.
"There are
many ways
in
which the feat
might
be
quickly
and
easily accomplished,
none
quicker
than that of
turning
a mirror round
and
round-you
would soon
enough
make the sun and
the
heavens,
and the earth and
yourself,
and other ani
[127]
This content downloaded from 84.205.227.38 on Wed, 20 Aug 2014 06:13:15 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
GRAND STREET
mals and
plants."
One
might
suppose
a trained
sculptor,
such as Socrates
was,
would know
better,
but since the
trick was
known,
it
really
was,
in his view,
easy,
even
in
sculpture-though admittedly
more
laborious,
which
is another matter. What Socrates was unaware of is how
difficult it was for it to become
easy
to make
convincing
images,
another instance of the Greek blindness to his
tory.
Vasari,
who
truly
had an historical
consciousness,
writes of the
great
difficulties artists
working
in the
light
of Giotto had in
"Imitating
the
perfection
of Nature
through
the Excellence of Art" until God took
pity
on
their
struggles
and caused
Michelangelo
to
appear
among
them to show the
way.
Pictorial
perception may
be a native
ability,
in the sense in which it is not
spe
cifically
learned.
Possibly something
like this is true for
picture-making
as
well,
though
there is no evidence to
suggest
that even such
gifted primates
as
Sara,
from
David Premack's
University
of
Pennsylvania laboratory,
are
capable
of it. But while it
may
be true that those of
us who can discriminate
pictures
can draw
them,
illu
sionistic art has to be
learnt,
and consists in a kind of
art. "The artist must have a
starting point"
which he
gets
from other
artists,
and the
myth
of the naive and inno
cent artist
setting up
his easel before a
landscape
and
putting
down on canvas what he
sees,
is as false in the
case of art as the
myth
of the
theoretically
unencum
bered scientist
letting
the "facts
speak
for themselves"
is in science.
Popper
has attacked the latter as Gombrich
has attacked the former
myth.
The artist works with
schemata that have been worked out
through
a
pictorial
tradition,
and stands to his
predecessors
in a
progressive
sequence something
like what we
may
be said to find in
science.
But the truth is that artists borrow from their
prede
cessors whether
they
are concerned with illusionistic
representation
or not:
every
art
history
has a
history
in
this sense.
Speaking
of
Malraux,
Gombrich
writes,
"Art
is born of
art,
not
nature,"
but this is so
generally
true of
art as to have no
particular application
to
representation
alistic art. Vasari observes that
Michelangelo's
contem
poraries
learned more from his cartoon for the War of
[128]
This content downloaded from 84.205.227.38 on Wed, 20 Aug 2014 06:13:15 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
ARTHUR C. DANTO
Pisa than his
predecessors
ever learned from the
study
of nature. And in one of his characteristic trucs of com
paring
commercial with fine
art,
Gombrich has
conjec
tured that "even the crude coloured
renderings
on a box
of breakfast cereal would have made Giotto's contem
poraries
gasp."
It is
just
here that the connection between
history
and
perception
dissolves. Giotto's
contemporaries
could have
perceived,
without
learning, immediately,
that these bowls of
goodness
were "better" bits of il
lusion than
anyone's
current
madonna,
and doubtless the
history
of art would have been
vastly
different had God
let a box of Wheaties fall into Giotto's Florence: there
would have been no need to send
Michelangelo
later on.
And Gombrich knows this
perfectly
well. In a
passage
which
gives
the
game away,
he
compares
the
finding
of
a form to the
fitting
of a
key
to a lock: "Once the door
springs open,
once the
key
is
shaped,
it is
easy
to
repeat
the
performance.
The next
person
needs no
special
in
sight."
There is doubtless an
interesting question
of
why
artists find it easier to
copy
one another than to
copy
nature,
but whatever the
case,
the
history
of art is not
in
any way dependent upon any
facts of
perception.
"Art has a
history,"
Gombrich
writes,
in The
Heritage of
Appelles, "precisely
because the methods of
constructing
an
acceptable image
have to be
developed
and have to
be learned." So
they
do. So must the methods of
cooking
acceptable
soufflees,
of
making
roofs that don't
leak,
or
building
bombs and
timepieces. Any technology happens
to have a
history,
so art as a
technology
of illusion has
a
history
as well.
Once illusion has become an artistic
commitment,
a
number of
problems
arise which our innate
pictorial
competences
will not
solve,
and The
Image
and the
Eye
takes
up
a number of these. The artist must learn to show
how characters
feel,
must learn to show them in move
ment and in
action,
and this
requires
him to
implant
certain cues which facilitate inference as to what is
happening
in the scenes
depicted.
The
problem
of de
picting
movement on still canvas is
complicated
in a
way
in which
depicting
three dimensions with two is
[129]
This content downloaded from 84.205.227.38 on Wed, 20 Aug 2014 06:13:15 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
GRAND STREET
not,
and I should like
briefly
to
explain why.
In our
highly pictorial
culture children have no
difficulty
in
mastering
the cues
by
which motion is
represented,
a set
of
signals
it is not at all
inappropriate
to call
a
'language"
in the loose sense in which this term is used these
days.
A
picture
of a man with three heads is read
as
moving
his one
head,
and not as a
freak,
in one standard comic
strip
device. Natives of
nonpictorial
cultures will not
make the
required
inference because
they
have not
learned the code. This will be
generally
true for
repre
sentations in which more is shown than can
literally
be
depicted
on a
plane.
When movies are taken
into the
jungle,
however,
there is no obstacle to
perceiving
mo
tion in
them,
for a
technology
of
perceptual equivalences
has
replaced
a scheme of
signs
and
inferences,
and we
have
engaged
the mechanisms of
perception
directly,
without the mediation of conventions. And this returns
me to the
history
of art.
By
the
early
twentieth
century,
the
problem
of
making
illusions was transferred from
painting
to
movie-making,
and
developed through
talkies to the
complex engineer
ing
which
goes
into the
production
of
"special
effects."
Illusionism is not
dead,
but has
merely transmigrated
to
another
representational
technology.
It cannot be
an
accident that at
just
that
time,
painters began
not so
much to abandon
representational
art as to redefine
their
identity
in
ways
which could no
longer
take illu
sionism for
granted.
The
history
of
twentieth-century
art is the
history
of this
quest,
which is
essentially philo
sophical,
and what Gombrich has to
say
is in conse
quence
no
longer applicable
to what art is or is about.
A
theory
of a
quite
different order than
the
theory
he
has worked out in his many
writings
is
urgently required,
even if we remove the flaws from
his statement of
it.
He
belongs
to the
past
he writes
about,
and there
is
nothing
in his work that
suggests
that he can
any
better
adapt
to the times than his ideas
can
be
adapted
to
them. This is the
explanation
of
why
we
may
honor
him
without
finding
any
use for his views in
understanding
deeply
the nature of art.
One mode of academic honor is to invite
someone
[
30]
This content downloaded from 84.205.227.38 on Wed, 20 Aug 2014 06:13:15 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
ARTHUR C. DANTO
to deliver a named
lecture,
and there cannot be
many
of these in his own or
neighboring
fields to which Gom
brich has not been asked. In
consequence,
his books
are almost
invariably
collections of lectures on a com
mon theme. It must be said that he has raised the art
history
lecture to a form of
literature. There is
through
out an
easy
conversational
tone,
embellished
by
confes
sional
anecdotes,
and articulated
by
the
necessity
to
move on to the next
slide,
so as a
reading
audience we are
seldom
fatigued,
and are entertained as we are in
structed. It is
always
a
challenge
to look at the illustra
tions before
reading
the
texts,
to see if one can
imagine
what thesis
they
will be asked to
support.
Almost
always,
they
make a
fascinating company,
with
pictures
of
masterpieces rubbing
shoulders with
advertising posters,
cartoons,
bits and
pieces
of decorative
art,
diagrams,
snapshots,
children's
art,
and technical illustrations from
psychology
texts. Der liebe Gott stecht in Detail-The
good
Lord is in the details-was a favored
saying
of
Aby
Warburg,
and
became,
according
to a footnote in Gom
brich's
biography
of that
strange
and
gifted person,
a
motto of the
Warburg Institute,
from whose
directorship
Gombrich
only recently
retired. And what one must
admire Gombrich for is
just
his
eye
for detail. From his
writings
one has the sense that his
eyes
are
always open,
that the most
ordinary,
the humblest
marks,
hold little
lessons for him and for us. And
yet
there is
something
sharply disconcerting
in the
thought
that der liebe Gott
is in the details of the
masterpieces,
and not in the master
pieces
themselves,
for the details in them teach us the
sorts of
things
the details teach in the
cartoons,
the
posters,
and the other
scraps
of the
figurative impulse
in
the
daily
transactions of men. And when Gombrich
juxta
poses, only
for
typical example,
the Madonna della Sedia
with a
hideously
drawn advertisement to
bring
out a
point regarding
circular
composition,
one feels an almost
moral
pang,
and wonders if this shows lack of taste or
hatred for the
Raphael?
Or is it all a
strategy
of art edu
cation,
trying,
in an almost Platonistic
way,
to draw our
attention
upward,
to forms the
pictorial
richness of our
daily
lives
may
have blinded us
to,
through
demonstrat
[131]
This content downloaded from 84.205.227.38 on Wed, 20 Aug 2014 06:13:15 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
GRAND STREET
ing
their
presence
in base and
secondary
embodiments?
Is he
exalting
the
lowly
or
deflating
the
great?
However this
ambiguity
of
style
is to be
resolved,
one
can
only
wish that this remarkable
eye
and mind
(bou
quet! )
had not been in servitude to a
theory
which has
blinded both to one of the most
fascinating periods
in
the
history
of
art,
the
period
he and we have been
living
through
for
decades,
and
to which he could have re
sponded
with
brilliance,
one almost
feels,
had he been
in New
York,
where so much of it
happened,
rather than
in
London,
which however otherwise
civilized,
has been
an artistic backwater
only faintly
stirred
by explosions
elsewhere.
[132]
This content downloaded from 84.205.227.38 on Wed, 20 Aug 2014 06:13:15 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions