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E. H. GombrichAuthor(s): Arthur C. DantoSource: Grand Street, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Winter, 1983), pp. 120-132Published by: Ben SonnenbergStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25006488

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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. Gombrich to lay a tributary bouquet at his feet before proceeding to their diffident discussions. Distinguished forhis scholarship and honored for the scholarly productionsin which it is displayed, he is treated as a kind of hu

manistic monument in his own right and accorded adeference rarely bestowed in our unrespecting, deconstructionist age. In truth, apart from reviews of his books,

writing about Gombrich has been remarkably sparse, buteven the critical silence seems a tribute paid. "Who of usknows enough properly to praise or appraise Gombrich'swork?" asks David Carrier in a fine synoptic article in arecent issue of Leonardo, almost explaining by therhetorical question the reflexive kowtow and the meagersecondary corpus. Figures of comparable stature in otherfields are

Modern Masters, objectsof

hermeneuticalvir

tuosity, so that scholars of the fourth echelon ponderinterpretations by scholars of the third echelon of readings by masters of the Master. But Gombrich appears tofunction more as a fetish to decorate with recognitionsthan 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 kindis so thin?

It is possible, of course, that the awed silence can beexplained through the fact that the primary pool of

anticipated commentators is composed of professional arthistorians, and these, in contrast with the visionary pioneers in that discipline, have become intellectually grudging-cautious, specialized, academical, and suspicious ofthe mise en question by which nearly every field ofintellectual and scholarly inquiry has been racked inrecent years. Gombrich truly belongs in the company ofthose visionaries (bouquet ), some of whom were histeachers, although he paid his professional dues with

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ARTHUR C. DANTO

an important dissertation on Giulio Romano and thePalazzo del Te-one of the first

shapingdiscussions of the

concept of Mannerism as exemplified in its first andgreatest monument. Still, his claim to wider attentionthan his fine art-historical contributions in the exacting

Warburg tradition would have earned him, rests onhis theory of art history itself, a theory indeed as towhy art has a history, a brilliant question to have raised

at all (bouquet ), and which drove him to seek foranswers in perceptual psychology and in postpositivisticepistemology. "I have tried to show 'why art has ahistory,"' he writes in The Sense of Order (1979) ofwhat is generally acknowledged to be his chief work,Art and Illusion (1960). "I found the reason in thepsychology of perception, which explains why we cannot transcribe what we see and have to resort to a

method of 'making and matching.'" The "slow processof 'making and matching'" is the counterpart, in thetheoretical history of art, to the method of conjectureand refutation made central in the theoretical history ofscience by Gombrich's own intellectual fetish, Karl Popper. Carrier's question

maythen be

rephrasedas: which

psychologists, philosophers, and art historians knowenough of one another's fields properly to appraise anedifice of thought which stands, like a three-leggedcolossus, with one foot in each? Since it must be plainthat a tripod has not a leg to stand on if it has notthree, the Gombrichian synthesis is everywhere vulner

able if it is anywhere weak, and it is not necessary toknow as much about as much as he does to bring thewhole thing down. The question then is why those whohave ventured to write about him as a thinker, and notjust to refer to him as part of the sweep of art-historicalscholarship, should have muffled criticism by appreciation and placed him at an exalted distance which is

tantamount to intellectual indifference-as though in theend 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 thepsychology of perception, enunciated broadly in Art and

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Illusion, reappears like a Gibsonian invariant in virtu

ally everythingGombrich has written since. It is the

basic generating thought of all that he has said, andthough he has had opportunities tomodify it through the

many opportunities he has had to present it, it remainsvery largely intact in his most recent publication, TheImage and the Eye, subtitled Further Studies in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation Cornell). There

are, of course, many ways in which pictures may represent-a picture of a man and then a woman, to use anexample of Lacan's, on adjacent doors, segregates thesexes without either image much looking like those whoseek relief behind the appropriate doors, and operate aspictorial symbols, to the recognition of which the psychology of perception serves no particular explanatoryfunction. Gombrich, by contrast, is primarily and exhaustively concerned with illusionistic pictorial representation, the manufacture of images which look like

what they are about because they have been manufactured to do so, and beyond question the psychology ofperception has much to tell us as to how such illusion ispossible (illusion is not the same as deception). Thekind 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 notbeen an artistic goal for some while, certainly not in therespect at least in which perceptual psychology may beof some use, with the possible exception of the short

lived op-artmovement.

And when I say that Gombrich'sthought does not much matter, I mean that what hesaid has, and can have, no considerable bearing on theart or the art-making of our times, nor be of value tothose who might turn to his writings thinking they cancontribute to the understanding of the baffling art of thiscentury, which seems so resolutely to have turned its

back on the enterprise of making things to match perceptual reality.

In his hugely successful History of Art, Gombrichwrites that there is no such thing as art, there are onlyartists. (If there is no such thing as art, there is clearlynothing the possibility of whose history needs explaining:

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there will only be the lives of the artists to write.) Ithink he said that because a

historyof art has to have a

concluding chapter on contemporary art, and Gombrichcould see no way of getting a definition which includedit and the illusionistic art with which he feels so comfortable; and perhaps he found in the antidefinitionismenunciated by Wittgenstein and his followers an easyway out. It is too easy, since the problem is only shifted

from what is art to who is an artist, and a theoreticalresponse to the art of our time requires equipment of afar different order than perceptual psychology or Popperian epistemology, a fact made vivid in the work ofDuchamp, who must be credited with the indispensablediscovery that something may be an artwork and yetperceptually indiscriminable from commonplace objectsof ordinary life, like snow shovels and bicycle wheels,which have no status as art at all. Gombrich has deniedthat all that counts as art for him is illusionistic art. He

wrote The Sense of Order to prove that he has a longand deep interest in ornament as well as image-asthough the nonrepresentationality of ornament had anything to do with the way in which modernist art is not

representational And when he has tried to address hiscontemporaries, it has been in terms altogether alien totheir motives, as when, for instance, he praises Rauschenberg (faintly) for enabling him to see ravaged surfacesin 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 matterwith Michael Fried and Joseph Masheck, to restrict

myself for the moment to writers who have an identityas 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 clearlyinformed by their struggles to comprehend the art of

their (of our) contemporaries. When I read Schapiro orSteinberg, I have the definite sense of someone who usesstructures accessible only to a very modem sensibilityto make discoveries regarding past expressions, and

which would be hidden until modernism revealed them.Gombrich is the absolute inverse, an essentially nine

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teenth-century ensibility rying o apply, futilely, whatit is trendy to call the Renaissance Paradigm to contem

porary expressions for which it is almost comically inadequate. One may see these crossed paradigms inGombrich's quite uncomprehending review of Leo Steinberg's book on Michelangelo's last paintings-workswhich of course fall squarely within the period illusionism defines, an incomprehension so deep as to raise thequestion of how useful the Renaissance

Paradigmis for

understanding even Renaissance art, if Steinberg is remotely right. Gombrich knows that there is more to artthan optics, and more to representational art than illusionism-the final chapter of Art and Illusion is "From

Representation to Expression"; but the issue is to whatdegree 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 isable to bring to that painting. Another masterpiece,Raphael's Madonna della Sedia, is given an impoverished, because merely formal and perceptual, analysisby Gombrich. Here even the circular shape must implythat some deep metaphor is being transacted on whichperceptual psychology, or the procedures of "making and

matching," must be silent. Gombrich understands the

eighteenth-century frame of that painting better by farthan 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 illusionistic art considered illusionistically, and abstracting fromall the largely nonperceptual factors he may very well

say it simply has not been his task to inquire into, thereis a problem of how adequate Gombrich's analysis has

been. In the remainder of this essay I shall restrict myself to that.

There is a compelling body of evidence in support of athesis that the power to perceive pictures is innate, andthat it cuts across the divisions between the species. The

perceptual psychologists Julian Hochberg and his wife,Virginia Brooks, in a now famous demonstration, raised

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a child to nineteen months in a picture-free environment,notwithstanding which, the child immediately appliedthe vocabulary it had acquired in connection with objects to pictures of those objects. "In line drawings,"

Hochberg writes, "the artist has not invented a completelyarbitrary language; indeed he has discovered a stimulusthat is equivalent in some ways to the features by whichthe visual system encodes the images of objects in thevisual

field,and

bywhich it

guides purposiveaction."

Chimpanzees, of course, spontaneously sign with picturesas they have learned to do with things, and in a recentseries of brilliant experiments, Richard Herrnstein hasshown that pigeons, working with photographs, haveabout 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 individualhuman beings, faltering at boundary lines at which wewould hesitate ourselves. There is a strong presumptionthat pigeons are "hard-wired" to recognize these kindsof things, but that they may transfer their gift to picturesis 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, onHerrnstein's estimate, have not shared an environmentfor upward of fifty million years.

In the essay "Image and Code," Gombrich cites a claimmade by the conventionalist philosopher Marx Wartof

sky that the word "dog" was "neither more nor less

like the real animal" than a picture Wartofsky (whohappens to be a good draftsman) drew on the board. Itis nice to see what pretends to be a philosophical positioncollide with psychological fact, and it is fairly plain thathad the Hochberg child been raised in a word-free en

vironment, however rich in pictures, he would hardlyhave been able spontaneously to select the right objectsas the denotations of words when these were finallyintroduced. Gombrich is perfectly right in rejecting

Wartofsky, or for that matter Nelson Goodman, on thethesis that words and pictures stand to the world in thesame sort of conventional relationship. Adam gave namesto things, but pictures are recognized. So there is reason

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to suppose we are dealing with a cognitive skill to be

explainedwith reference to the

waywe are

built,and

it is today a matter of intense experimental investigationwhat the boundaries are of these competences, as well asof object-to-picture and picture-to-object transfers whichare, in the human case at least, the basis for supposingthat 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 thesame recognitional powers are exercised in picking outa picture as in picking out two instances of something ina given category: the two instances need resemble oneanother to no greater degree than either resembles the

picture, and we may recognize Peter and Paul by thesame cues by which we recognize a picture of a man,

without our believing the picture to be a man any morethan we believe Peter to be Paul. Illusionism arises at adifferent level. Perhaps every culture has discoveredand used pictures, but Gombrich writes, echoing Vasari,"Only twice on this globe, in ancient Greece and in

Renaissance Europe, have artists striven systematically,

througha succession of

generations, step by stepto

approximate their images to the visual world and achievelikenesses that might deceive the eye." It is very largelyto the concepts connected up in this sentence that Gombrich has devoted his thought: image, reality, generations, step-by-step, and illusion-to the making ratherthan merely the perception of pictures, and then espe

cially to the making of pictures "which might deceivethe eye." I find no special explanation in Gombrich's

writings as to why artists in these two periods shouldhave pursued this special program; though, interestinglyenough, in "Visual Discovery through Art," he seekssome explanation of why no one else has pursued it, as

though itwere the natural way to go. I am also unclear

whether the program was pursued elsewhere but withinsufficient success for us to be able to acknowledge itas a motive. But, to take a case he has examined closely,and on which he is almost certainly correct in claimingit a discovery, fixed-point perspective, there is visual evidence that the Chinese would have used it had they

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found it, since they employ mists and trees to break uplines which would look incorrect if

uninterrupted.And

Alan Tormey has recently found evidence that the Japanese realized what was wrong with their treatment ofspace when they sawWestern representations in correctperspective. This suggests that both those cultures had illusionist ambitions they did not know how to achieve,since after all they used other devices, like occlusion,

constancies, aerial perspective, and the like.Now itmay have been a matter of cultural decision tosponsor image-making which is illusionistic, without itsfollowing that it is a matter of cultural decision, or convention, which devices are optically convincing. The

deployment of spatial forms, the uses of illumination todefine forms and the relationship between forms, are

genuine discoveries inWestern art, as much so as discoveries in science, and to a degree Gombrich is justifiedin drawing his parallels between illusionistic art andnatural sciences, construed as producing correct representations of the world. And he is correct in saying thatit is a matter of perceptual psychology to explain whycertain schemata of

pictorial representationare

opticallyconvincing. What perceptual psychology will not explain,however, is why art has a history, so the internal connection he wants between the history of art and the

psychology of perception simply will not hold.

At a famous part of the Republic, Socrates ismade to

argue for what are doubtless Plato's views, that theartist is caught up in the socially, or politically, dangerous 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 therhetorical contrast between "appearance" and "reality" al

ready tries to do. It is less frequently recognized as partof the rhetoric of minimization that Socrates claims it iseasy tomake such appearances. "There are many ways inwhich the feat might be quickly and easily accomplished,none quicker than that of turning a mirror roundand round-you would soon enough make the sun andthe heavens, and the earth and yourself, and other ani

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mals and plants." One might suppose a trained sculptor,such as Socrates was, would know better, but since thetrick was known, it really was, in his view, easy, evenin sculpture-though admittedly more laborious, whichis another matter. What Socrates was unaware of is howdifficult itwas for it to become easy to make convincingimages, 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 lightof Giotto had in "Imitating the perfection of Naturethrough the Excellence of Art" until God took pity ontheir struggles and caused Michelangelo to appearamong them to show the way. Pictorial perception maybe a native ability, in the sense in which it is not specifically learned. Possibly something like this is true for

picture-making as well, though there is no evidence tosuggest that even such gifted primates as Sara, from

David Premack's University of Pennsylvania laboratory,are capable of it. But while itmay be true that those ofus who can discriminate pictures can draw them, illusionistic art has to be learnt, and consists in a kind ofart. "The artist must have a starting point" which he getsfrom other artists, and the myth of the naive and innocent artist setting up his easel before a landscape and

putting down on canvas what he sees, is as false in thecase of art as the myth of the theoretically unencumbered scientist letting the "facts speak for themselves"is in science. Popper has attacked the latter as Gombrich

has attacked the former myth. The artistworks with

schemata that have been worked out through a pictorialtradition, and stands to his predecessors in a progressivesequence something like what we may be said to find inscience.

But the truth is that artists borrow from their predecessors whether they are concerned with illusionistic

representation or not: every art history has a history inthis sense. Speaking of Malraux, Gombrich writes, "Artis born of art, not nature," but this is so generally true ofart as to have no particular application to representationalistic art. Vasari observes that Michelangelo's contem

poraries learned more from his cartoon for the War of

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Pisa than his predecessors ever learned from the studyof nature. And in one of his characteristic trucs of com

paring commercial with fine art, Gombrich has conjectured that "even the crude coloured renderings on a boxof breakfast cereal would have made Giotto's contemporaries gasp." It is just here that the connection betweenhistory nd perception issolves.Giotto's ontemporariescould have perceived, without learning, immediately,

that these bowls of goodness were "better" bits of illusion than anyone's current madonna, and doubtless the

history of art would have been vastly different had Godlet 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 passagewhich gives the game away, he compares the finding of

a form to the fitting of a key to a lock: "Once the doorsprings open, once the key is shaped, it is easy to repeatthe performance. The next person needs no special in

sight." There is doubtless an interesting question of whyartists find it easier to copy one another than to copynature, but whatever the case, the history of art is notin any way

dependent uponany facts of perception.

"Art has a history," Gombrich writes, in The Heritage ofAppelles, "precisely because the methods of constructingan acceptable image have to be developed and have tobe learned." So they do. So must the methods of cookingacceptable 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 hasa history as well.

Once illusion has become an artistic commitment, anumber of problems arise which our innate pictorialcompetences will not solve, and The Image and the Eyetakes up a number of these. The artist must learn to show

how characters feel, must learn to show them in movement and in action, and this requires him to implantcertain 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

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not, and I should like briefly to explain why. In our

highly pictorialculture children have no

difficultyin

mastering the cues by which motion is represented, a setof 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 movinghis 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 notlearned the code. This will be generally true for representations in which more is shown than can literallybe depicted on a plane. When movies are taken into the

jungle, however, there is no obstacle to perceiving motion in them, for a technology of perceptual equivalenceshas replaced a scheme of signs and inferences, and we

have engaged the mechanisms of perception directly,without the mediation of conventions. And this returnsme to the history of art.

By the early twentieth century, the problem of makingillusions was transferred from painting to movie-making,and developed through talkies to the complex engineer

ingwhich

goesinto the

productionof

"specialeffects."

Illusionism is not dead, but has merely transmigrated toanother representational technology. It cannot be anaccident that at just that time, painters began not so

much to abandon representational art as to redefinetheir identity in ways which could no longer take illusionism for granted. The history of twentieth-century

art is the history of this quest, which is essentially philosophical, 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 hehas 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 betteradapt to the times than his ideas can be adapted tothem. This is the explanation of why we may honor him

without finding any use for his views in understandingdeeply the nature of art.

One mode of academic honor is to invite someone

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ARTHUR C. DANTO

to deliver a named lecture, and there cannot be manyof these in his own or neighboring fields to which Gombrich has not been asked. In consequence, his booksare almost invariably collections of lectures on a com

mon theme. It must be said that he has raised the arthistory lecture to a form of literature. There is throughout an easy conversational tone, embellished by confessional anecdotes, and articulated by the necessity to

move on to the nextslide,

so as areading audience we areseldom fatigued, and are entertained as we are in

structed. It is always a challenge to look at the illustrations 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 frompsychology texts. Der liebe Gott stecht in Detail-Thegood Lord is in the details-was a favored saying of Aby

Warburg, and became, according to a footnote in Gombrich's biography of that strange and gifted person, a

motto of theWarburg Institute, from whose directorshipGombrich only recently retired. And what one mustadmire 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 littlelessons for him and for us. And yet there is somethingsharply disconcerting in the thought that der liebe Gottis in the details of the

masterpieces,and not in the master

pieces themselves, for the details in them teach us thesorts of things the details teach in the cartoons, the

posters, and the other scraps of the figurative impulse inthe daily transactions of men. And when Gombrich juxtaposes, only for typical example, the Madonna della Sedia

with a hideously drawn advertisement to bring out a

point regarding circular composition, one feels an almostmoral pang, and wonders if this shows lack of taste orhatred for the Raphael? Or is it all a strategy of art education, trying, in an almost Platonistic way, to draw ourattention upward, to forms the pictorial richness of our

daily lives may have blinded us to, through demonstrat

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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, onecan only wish that this remarkable eye and mind (bouquet ) had not been in servitude to a theory which hasblinded both to one of the most fascinating periods inthe history of art, the period he and we have been livingthrough for decades, and to which he could have re

spondedwith

brilliance,one almost

feels,had he been

in New York, where so much of it happened, rather thanin London, which however otherwise civilized, has beenan artistic backwater only faintly stirred by explosionselsewhere.

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Documents

h. Gombrich