7GOMBRICH'S STORY OF ART*

Richard Woodfield
Un punto de partida para la discusin del libro es que gombrich concibe a la ambicin del arte como la
illusion o major dicho que toda la historia del arte puede ser considerada como el ideal del
ilusionista. La respuesta obvia a esto es que la historia de la arquitectura la cual aparece
continuamente en la historia del arte. Debemos pensar que el alemn Kunst incluye la arqueitectura
pero que el uso tpico en el espaol no lo hace. Debemos entender que este libro surge de una
manera alemana de pensar en el sujeto.
En este punto podemos reconocicer que arteno es tan solo una palabra del idioma ingles si no que
es tambin una categaria culturalmtente relativa: la palabra en si tiene acepciones no consensuadas
en distintas lenguas. El temino arte es lingstica, cultural e hstoricamente relatibvo.
El termino relativo pertiene al libro dada la aversin de gombrich a las nociones de relativismo
absoluto. La manera en que el libro lidia con las nociones de valor artstico se puede boservar en la
idea dicha al comienzo del libro cuando dice que no hay tal cosa como el arte solo hay artistas.
Una idea familiar es volver al uso antiguo de arte en el cual se referia a habilidad o maestria ya sea
como en el arte de la guerra de sun tzu o el arte del amor esta es la manera en que ars se ocupa
en latin. Este termino fue reemplazo en el periodo romntico por uno que se referia a una facultad
en el alma humana clasificable en la misma posicin que la religin o la ciencia. Lo que Gombrich en
general considera relavante es la habilidad utilizada en la creacin de imgenes.
Una de las ideas centrales del libro es que en distintos periodos de la historia y en distintas culturas
la creacion de imagenes a servido distintos roles. Los distintos periodos ofrecieron a los artistas
distintas tareas. Artistas trabajando en en la europa occidental heredaron n proyecto que naci en la
antigedad. Ese proyecto tiene una historia que es seguible. Los griegos introdujeron la evolucin de
producir imgenes figurativas utilizando el principio del espectador o sea el de la pieza vista por un
espectador fijo desde un punto de vista especifico. De todas maneras el arte griego nunca fue, como
platon dijo, un espejo de la realidad, haba una preocupacin mayor con la variedad de la naturaleza
en una imagen egipcia qe en una griega. Los artistas medievales tenean distintas preocupaciones,
ellos trabajaban una forma de pictografa mas que una visualizacin de un espectador esta si
embargo poseaia rasgos de los descubrimientos visuales de los antiguos. La urgencia por pintar lo
que uno ve surgio solo en el renacimiento. Otros artistas trabajando insertados en otras tradiciones
tenan otras ambiciones y llevaron sus actividades creadoreas de imagines a distintos niveles de
refinacion. Una importantsima tradicin alternativa es la china.
Gombrich assume una postura critica frente a lo que se llama el esteticismo ahistorico tipico
de ciertos historiadores que se basan en un prejuicio de unidad de porpositos artisticos. Gombrich
describe que la inclusin de una amplia variedad de distintos artefactos de distintas culturas y
periodos en los museos lleva a la gente a la falsa conclusin que todo eso es Arte cuando existe
evidentemente una distinta respuesta individual del artista a distintas situaciones.
La clave esta en el rol que la tradicion tiene dentro del desarrollo historico de nuestra
cultura . para definir una cultura en trminos de sus productos mas recientes seria eliminar su

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Gombrichs Stories of Art

nucleo central. De la msma manera que un lenguaje ofrece un recurso ara creatividad ilimitada y
trae consigo un equipaje de tradicin insertado en el de la misma manera lo hacen las otras artes. El
artista crea nuevos recursos para el artista del futuro y su arte trae consigo partes de la cultura que
lo precede.
De la misma manera en que la prosa alcanzo su apogeo realista en el siglo 19 por medio de
la ilusin de la realidad de los personajes de la misma manera los artistas visuales del renacimiento
utilizaron tcnicas de trucos visuales para dar la sensacin de realismo.
Mas no son las tcnicas las que producen arte sofisticado las tcnicas van asociadas a una
cierta poesa visual. Es este juego semntico mas la maestria tcnica la que identifica al genio.
But linguistic complexity does not, of itself, produce a fine novel or poem and visual,
technical skills do not, of themselves, generate works of art. After all, one point linear perspective
simply offers a schema to handle size relationships in space and an understanding of the workings of
occlusion. Raphael did not simply create The School of Athens from his knowledge of perspective and
Michaelangelo's Last Judgement displays more than a good working knowledge of anatomy; it is the
visual 'poetry' which makes them both works of art.
The nineteenth century witnessed the end of an engagement with a living tradition of
artistic achievement dating back to the Italian renaissance. A search for new standards emerged.
Contrary to popular belief Gombrich is not hostile to twentieth-century art per se, though he is
definitely unsympathetic to much of it. His concern is more with the doctrines which have led it to
develop in the ways in which it has, and particularly the ways in which art has become captured by
ideologists. A central question today is not whether a work of art is good but whether it is on the
side of progress, even in a period which claims to have disposed of master narratives.
Few people, particularly ideological commentators, seem to have given much serious
thought to the 1965 Postscript to The Story of Art (now pp. 612-18). Gombrich pointed to the
significance of the ideas that one should be of one's time, that we are all riding on the tide of
historical progress and that we should deny the value and continued relevance of what has been
achieved in the past. Taken to their logical conclusion they result in barbarism, an example being
Ceaucescu's forced transformation of Rumania by eviction and bulldozer. What many of
modernism's supporters forget is that the past continues to have a valued present. Indeed a number
of modernist practitioners actively conducted raids into past art to provide motifs for their own; Der
Blaue Reiter and Picasso offer cases in point. Its supporters, however, have treated the visual arts as
a polarizing issue to contrast the enlightened with the benighted: the former must reject the past
and the latter's enthusiasm for Rembrandt, Beethoven and Dostoevsky marks them as
unregenerately behind the times. It does not seem to strike anyone that this is an unintelligent
attitude to take. And because Gombrich maintains that one cannot have achievement without the
refinement and development of skills, i.e. tradition, he is branded a conservative.
At this point it would be useful to extend his institutional analysis of artistic practice to the
teaching of art history. If art history departments once used to serve the interests of curators and
connoisseurs, they have now become a target for political activists. The great artistic achievements
of the past have been labelled High Art and dismissed as having traditionally served the interests of
the dominant classes. Judgements of value are now simply seen as reflecting ideological interest.
Our culture, as a source of value, has been replaced by a value free system of cultures to be studied
as a sociologist would study any other form of consumer behaviour.
In an essay 'Art History and the Social Sciences' (reprinted in Ideals and Idols, Oxford, 1979)
Gombrich made the point that 'the sociologist can always tell us which are the top ten; he cannot

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commit himself to picking a first eleven. The top ten, as we know, are based on real or pretended
statistics of sale; the choice of a first eleven is a matter of past performanceand of faith' (p. 155).
Although facts may assist in making value judgements, the value judgements themselves remain
unprovable. One cannot prove that Raphael was a better artist than Botticelli, even on Gombrich's
account of technical development because, as he often says, an achievement in one direction is
often accomplished with a loss in another. Nevertheless, they both deserve a place in a first eleven.
If one had no faith in one's own first eleven, one would be lost.
Great art offers a better filter through which I might understand myself and others (the
central tenet of Bildung) than anything else. Engels actually addressed this problem in a letter to
Margaret Harkness when he described Balzac's Comdie Humaine as more revealing about the state
of French society than any tendentious literature, despite the fact that he was a legitimist (Maynard
Solomon, Marxism and Art, Brighton, 1979, pp. 67-9). And Walter Benjamin, another product of
Bildung, rated quality of artistic performance more highly than political correctness ('The Author as
Producer', in Understanding Brecht, London, 1977). Ideologues who teach 'minority cultures' are
usually those who have been trained in the major leagues.
Our own European cultures (in the plural) would not have their distinctive physiognomies
without their masterpieces. The qualitative characteristics of a culture are not measurable, but that
is not to say that they are not there. Interests, enjoyments and desires are better satisfied in some
places rather than others. British patrons of the eighteenth century recognized this when they
imported their art, painters and composers from France and Italy and exported their sons on the
Grand Tour. They knew what they wanted their world to be and acted on it, to the extent of
employing architects and landscape gardeners to transform their living environments. Valued
features of an environment may be discoverably there.
I once had a self-professed working class student who took some very boring photographs of
her own immediate locale. When she was challenged by the staff to make more interesting pictures,
she replied that she was not interested in producing picturesque photographs for her middle class
tutors because her environment was boring. She obviously shared her tutors' view of her own
environment; so much for the relativity of values.
Although one may not be able to justify a value system, at least within that system one may
indicate the things which give it its value. This does not result in a canonical first eleven, but at least
some debate over what might be in it. There is no debate over the point of its being there.
As Gombrich himself has often remarked, the book was born out of a particular intellectual milieu:
the pursuit of Bildung, which was the secular religion of German speakers of the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. In his own Viennese home, it was believed that it was important to have a
commitment to nature and art, which were 'needs of the mind' (see 'Nature and Art as Needs of the
Mind', in Tributes, Oxford, 1984). Leaving nature to one side, Art consisted of whatever was great
and good in the history of culture, the classics of music, literature and the visual arts. This included
world art to the extent that Gombrich's nursery stories included tales from the Mahabarata. He was
brought up on a diet of good books, from Homer through Shakespeare and Goethe to Dostoevsky
and Ibsen, and music in the classical German tradition. He was also encouraged to explore the city's
museums, which he did with great enthusiasm. The Austrian Museum of Arts and Crafts played a
similar role to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and contained a vast range of artefacts
from across the world including 'one of the richest collections of oriental rugs anywhere in the
world' (E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order, Oxford, 1979, p. 180). Its wide range of paintings and
drawings contained a significant volume of work from the Middle Ages and the Northern European

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schools, echoing the interests of its founder Rudolph Eitelberger von Edelberg. It is not surprising, to
me at least, that Bildung should have bred the great anthropologists and philologists of the
nineteenth century. Neither does it surprise me that Gombrich, with his friend Kurz, should have
studied Chinese when leaving university or that his son is now Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford
University.
Freud and Marx, as well, were brought up in the tradition of Bildung. For Freud,
psychoanalysis had nothing to say about what made Art with a capital 'A' and had little relevance to
the practice of Art (see E. H. Gombrich, `Freud's Aesthetics', in Richard Woodfield (ed.), Reflections
on the History of Art, Oxford, 1987). And for Marx, 'the difficulty ... (of) Greek art and epos ... lies in
understanding why they still constitute for us a source of aesthetic enjoyment and in certain
respects still prevail as the standard and model beyond attainment' (Introduction to A Contribution
to the Critique of Political Economy, quoted in Solomon, p. 62). As Gombrich himself said, 'it is wholly
understandable that it has ... become usual to explain and if possible to excuse Freud's rejection of
modern art by pointing to the prejudices of his generation and of his milieu.' But as he went on to
say, 'it is always somewhat risky to dispose of the views of a great man which we find uncomfortable
... We may be quite sure that he had theoretical reasons for his attitude' (`Verbal Wit as a Paradigm
of Art', in Tributes, p. 103).
Gombrich's own discomfort with modem art was born out of its advocates claims and what
he sees as its tendencies to regression. I must confess that I share his preference for Beethoven over
the latest experiments in atonalism or post-modem pastiche, and give me Rembrandt, Degas and
the best Persian carpets any day. There is no need to be exclusive, however. But there is an
important difference between knowing one's Rembrandt and knowing about Rembrandt: therein
lies the difference between Bildung and the academy.