He is better, in a sense, at pictographs than paintings, perhaps because, unlike Schapiro, he is an intellectual who practices art history rather thanĪn art historian who is also an intellectual. Gombrich's clarity, his Johnsonian abhorrence of cant,Ĭomes at the cost of a certain attention to the esthetic side of art. And while he can make you want to head for the library to read more philosophy, he doesn't necessarily make you want to run to a museum, the way Schapiro does. True, Gombrich sometimes leaves an impression that he's straining to sound like the rest ''it would have been a failure of Einstein's, not a mark of his brilliance.'' It's no coincidence that two of the most important art historians of the last 50 years, GombrichĪnd Meyer Schapiro, are notable not just for their brilliance but for being among the most lucid and straightforward writers in the field. Recently the physicist Steven Weinberg pointed out in The New York Review of Books that it never was true that only a dozen people could understand Einstein's papers on general relativity. Gombrich will most likely find something fresh. If you don't know them, or him, you can find out a greatĭeal from ''The Essential Gombrich,'' which brings together key excerpts from classics like '' Art and Illusion'' and also from less familiar sources, so that even people familiar with '' Art and Illusion'' and ''Meditations on a Hobby Horse,'' and on a number of groundbreaking essays on Renaissance art. Gombrich's enormous reputation otherwise rests on writings like Its 16th edition, revised and expanded, has recently appeared as a copiously illustrated paperback. In fact, we've got so accustomed to seeing this way that it's difficult to see what is literallyĪt 87, Sir Ernst Gombrich may be the best-known art historian of all time, thanks to ''The Story of Art,'' which he reluctantly began to write in the 1930's as a history of art for childrenīut then turned into a basic and hugely popular text for adults. So we disregard the literal interpretation that the waves rise one above the other into the air. We have come instinctively to accept in a painted seascape, say, that stacked white lines of diminishing size denote To an image and the reality of what it represents - which is not the same as saying that the image mirrors reality. System of conventions evolved over centuries of trial and error, a process he has famously called ''making and matching.'' Illusion is achieved when, as Gombrich puts it, there is a correspondence between our reaction Gombrich's most familiar examples of what he has been telling us for years about illusion in art, which is that it is not as simple as it may look. But what could a directional line mean to creatures who hadn't invented bows and arrows? And if, somehow, they were to grasp that the drawings depicted humans, withoutĪ knowledge of foreshortening how could they know that the woman's body was slightly turned, obscuring a hand? They would assume that Earth women have a claw. The pictograph was meant to be, quite literally, universal. The sun and its nine planets were a row of circles an arrow from the fourth circle, Earth, pointed to a drawing of Pioneer. Line drawings described a man and a woman. Human beings look like and where Earth is in our solar system. In the unlikely event that beings from outer space intercepted the craft, the pictograph was supposed to tell them what Maybe you recall that when the Pioneer spacecraft was launched in 1972 it carried with it a pictograph, widely reproduced at the time. The New York Times: Book Review Search Article
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |