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Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich (; ; 30 March 1909 – 3 November 2001) was an Austrian-born art historian who, after settling in England in 1936,Lyons, M. (2013). Books: a living history. London: Thames & Hudson. became a naturalised British citizen in 1947 and spent most of his working life in the United Kingdom.
Ernst Gombrich was the author of many works of cultural history and art history, most notably The Story of Art, a book widely regarded as one of the most accessible introductions to the visual arts, and Art and Illusion,Shone, Richard and Stonard, John-Paul, eds.. The Books That Shaped Art History: From Gombrich and Greenberg to Alpers and Krauss, chapter 9. London: Thames & Hudson, 2013. a major work in the psychology of perception that influenced thinkers as diverse as Carlo Ginzburg,Ginzburg, Carlo. "From Aby Warburg to E. H. Gombrich". In Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, 46. Baltimore: JHU Press, 1989. Nelson Goodman,N. Goodman: Languages of Art, Indianapolis and Cambridge, 1976. Umberto Eco,U. Eco: Theory of Semiotics, Bloomington, 1976, pp. 204–205. and Thomas Kuhn.T. S. Kuhn 1962/2012. Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 4th Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, page 160, Ftnt. 1
At the Conservatoire she was a pupil of, amongst others, Anton Bruckner. However, rather than follow a career as a concert pianist (which would have been difficult to combine with her family life in this period) she became an assistant of Theodor Leschetizky. She also knew Arnold Schoenberg, Gustav Mahler, Hugo Wolf and Johannes Brahms.Didier Eribon. A Lifelong Interest London: Thames & Hudson;
Rudolf Serkin was a close family friend. Adolf Busch and members of the Busch Quartet regularly met and played in the family home. Throughout his life Gombrich maintained a deep love and knowledge of classical music. He was a competent cellist and in later life at home in London regularly played the chamber music of Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven and others with his wife and his elder sister Dea Forsdyke, a concert violinist.
Gombrich was educated at the Theresianum and at the University of Vienna, where he studied art history under Hans Tietze, , Julius von Schlosser and Josef Strzygowski, completing a PhD thesis on the Mannerist architecture of Giulio Romano, supervised by Von Schlosser. Specialised in caricature, he was invited to help Ernst Kris, who was then keeper of decorative arts at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, on his graduating in 1933.
In 1936, he married Ilse Heller (1910–2006), a pupil of his mother, and herself an accomplished pianist. Their only child, the Indologist Richard Gombrich, was born in 1937. They had two grandchildren: the educationalist Carl Gombrich, (b. 1965) and Leonie Gombrich (b. 1966), who is his literary executor.
After publishing his first book A Little History of the World in German in 1936, written for children and adolescents, and seeing it become a hit only to be banned by the Nazis for pacifism, he fled to Britain in 1936 to take up a post as a research assistant at the Warburg Institute, University of London.
During World War II, Gombrich worked for the BBC World Service, monitoring German radio broadcasts. When in 1945 an upcoming announcement was prefaced by the Adagio of Anton Bruckner's seventh symphony, written for Richard Wagner's death, Gombrich guessed correctly that Adolf Hitler was dead and promptly broke the news to Churchill.
Gombrich returned to the Warburg Institute in November 1945, where he became Senior Research Fellow (1946), Lecturer (1948), Reader (1954), and eventually Professor of the History of the Classical Tradition and director of the institute (1959–76). He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1960, appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1966 New Year Honours,United Kingdom list: Knight Bachelor in the 1972 Birthday Honours,United Kingdom list: and appointed a member of the Order of Merit in 1988. He continued his work at the University of London until close to his death in 2001. He was the recipient of numerous additional honours, including Goethe Prize 1994 and Balzan Prize in 1985 for History of Western Art.
Gombrich was close to a number of Austrian émigrés who fled to the West prior to the Anschluss, among them Karl Popper (to whom he was especially close), Friedrich Hayek and Max Perutz. He was instrumental in bringing to publication Popper's magnum opus The Open Society and Its Enemies. Each had known the other only fleetingly in Vienna, as Gombrich's father served his law apprenticeship with Popper's father. They became lifelong friends in exile.
Gombrich's first book, and the only one he did not write in English, was Eine kurze Weltgeschichte für junge Leser ("A short history of the world for young readers"), published in Germany in 1936. It was very popular and translated into several languages, but was not available in English until 2005, when a translation of a revised edition was published as A Little History of the World. He did most of this translation and revision himself, and it was completed by his long-time assistant and secretary Caroline Mustill and his granddaughter Leonie Gombrich after his death.Leonie Gombrich in the Preface to A Little History of the World New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
The Story of Art, first published in 1950 and currently in its 16th edition, is widely regarded as one of the most accessible introductions to the history of visual arts. Originally intended for adolescent readers, it has sold millions of copies and been translated into more than 30 languages.
He became the director of the Warburg Institute in 1959, holding that position until 1976–making his tenure as director the longest-standing in the institution’s history.
The following year he published Art and Illusion (1960), regarded by critics to be his most influential and far-reaching work. Shortly thereafter a group of Gombrich’s essays were gathered for his anthology Meditations on a Hobby Horse (1963).
Other important books are Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (1970), The Sense of Order (1979), The Image and the Eye (1981), and The Preference for the Primitive (posthumously in 2002). The complete list of his publications, E. H. Gombrich: A Bibliography, was published by Joseph Burney Trapp in 2000.
It was in Art and Illusion that he introduced the ideas of 'schemata', 'making and matching', 'correction' and 'trial and error'Paul Richter "On Professor Gombrich's Model of Schema and Correction", British Journal of Aesthetics (1976) 16 (4): 338–346 influenced by 'conjecture and refutation', in Popper's philosophy of science. In Gombrich's view, the artist compares what he has drawn or painted with what he is trying to draw/paint, and by a 'feedback loop' gradually corrects the drawing/painting to look more like what he is seeing. The process does not start from scratch, however. Each artist inherits '"schemata" that designate reality by force of convention'.Wood, Christopher S., "E. H. Gombrich's Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 1960" , The Burlington Magazine, December 2009 These schemata, plus the techniques and works of previous masters, are the starting points from which the artist begins her own process of trial and error.
The philosophical conceptions developed by Popper for a philosophy of science meshed well with Gombrich's ideas for a more robust explanation of the history of art. Gombrich had written his first major work The Story of Art in 1950, ten years before Art and Illusion. The earlier book has been described as viewing the history of art as a narrative moving 'from what ancient artists "knew" to what later artists "saw"'.Obituary, Daily Telegraph And as Gombrich was always more concerned with the individual rather than mass movements (the famous first line of The Story of Art is 'There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists'Gombrich, E H. The Story of Art London:Phaidon Press Ltd, ), he saw the use of scientific and psychological explanations as key to understanding how these individual artists 'saw', and how they built upon the traditions they had inherited and of which they were a part. With the dialectics of making and matching, schema and correction, Gombrich sought to ground artistic development on more universal truths, closer to those of science, than on what he regarded as fashionable or vacuous terms such as 'zeitgeist' and other 'abstractions'.Sir Ernst Gombrich OM, Obituary, Daily Telegraph
The four-volume series Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (1966) comprises the volumes Norm and Form; Symbolic Images; The Heritage of Apelles; and New Light on Old Masters, and made a major contribution to the study of in the work of this period.
Gombrich was a great admirer of Leonardo da Vinci and wrote extensively on him, both in these volumes and elsewhere.Ernst Gombrich
In October 2014 an English Heritage blue plaque for Gombrich was unveiled by sculptor Antony Gormley at 19 Briardale Gardens, Hampstead, alongside Sir Peter Bazalgette, chair of the Arts Council and blue plaque panel member, Richard Gombrich and the art historian Prof David Freedberg. The plaque reads: "E. H. Gombrich (1909 – 2001) Art Historian lived here 1952 to 2001." Gormley lived as a child a couple of doors down from the house.
While several works of Gombrich (especially Art and Illusion in 1960) had enormous impact on art history and other fields, his categorical attacks on historism have been accused (by Carlo Ginzburg) of leading to "barren" scholarship;Carlo Ginzburg. "From Aby Warburg to E. H. Gombrich." In Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, 43. Baltimore: JHU Press, 1989. many of his methodological arguments have been superseded by the work of art historians like Svetlana Alpers and his own student Michael Baxandall.Shone, Richard and Stonard, John-Paul, eds.. The Books That Shaped Art History: From Gombrich and Greenberg to Alpers and Krauss, chapter 13. London: Thames & Hudson, 2013.
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