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The Story of Art, by E.H. Gombrich
Feb. 17th, 2020 03:47 pmI wanted a book which would help with writing an art history student character. This does.
The Story of Art is a classic: it has sixteen editions, of which this is the thirteenth, and when I mentioned to my employer that I was reading an overview of art history for story research she said, "Is it Gombrich?" I can see why it's lasted. It was originally written for children, and is a best-case scenario of expert speaking to first learner. Every artwork it mentions, it illustrates -- not all in color, you can see Gombrich spending his color-plate allocation and deciding which points he can make well enough in black and white. The spine of the book is the story of realism, from Ancient Egypt to the Impressionists, and it's structured so that you can see why the artworks it discusses are amazing: the pivotal ones arrive in his story like culminations of all that came before, triumphant solutions to problems posed earlier -- only to be referred back to from ten pages further on as, not inadequate on their own terms, but inadequate on the terms they caused people to think in next. On the way, the book contains things like a simple description of why the Gothic style of architecture arose, (a rise I saw very clearly when travelling from Greece to Prague without any more idea why than 'they learned to use stone differently'), and by what stages perspective came about, how much it initially excited Renaissance artists, how long it took until they were sure what to do with it. How do you make beautiful compositions while also obeying the rules of three-dimensional space? Ask Raphael, a century later -- or just have fun watching Uccello have fun as he impeccably foreshortens fallen lances on an otherwise very odd-looking battlefield.
I both wish I'd read this book before I went to the galleries of New York and Prague, and am glad to have those galleries as reference points, so that I know what blazing reality lies behind the vague wash of Turner in illustration, and bear in mind that Cezanne, whose masterful achievement of four or five apparently incompatible things Gombrich describes for two solid pages, may not be as dull as he seems to me on the basis of his illustrations here.
Downsides: on the strength of this book, my art history student isn't going to know much beyond Europe. 'Primitive art' gets a chapter. (Gombrich starts out by saying 'I do not think that there are any wrong reasons for liking a statue or picture.' Without that basic attitude, his version of 'How shall we understand cave paintings? Let us turn for comparison to the art of primitive peoples of our own day' would be even worse, but that's in there). China gets praise but only six illustrations -- and it was a useful early calibration moment when Gombrich said "It may not be easy for us to appreciate the boldest of these works..." about the image in the book which I had up to that point found most powerfully evocative. I may need to get a hold of the book, written in response to this one, called Stories of Art.
...
I went to the Wellington City Gallery's new exhibition after finishing Gombrich. What did I find? No paintings, for one thing. Well, I tell a lie: one painting, a rectilinear spiderweb of wavering black lines. Where Gombrich was most useful to me was in thinking about how recent a development galleries are, and how recently art began to be done without commission, without inbuilt purpose. None of what was there seemed to be a continuation of quite the story he'd been telling, or else it's well on in the direction Gombrich's heart seemed not to tend, past the problems of representation into the question, what can this medium do with its materials? Gombrich touches on the playful possibilities of materials -- mentions painting as a way of seeing what can be done with paint as a substance -- but he doesn't dwell on it. It's one of the things I most often see in sculpture, when I visit this gallery: material wit, things that aren't what they seem to be, things created because no one's created them before. On the first floor, twine had been soaked in concrete and hung from rusty steel grilles, some of which were then swung down from the ceiling to hang from two corners only, or rest on the floor, after the concrete hardened. This gives an initially mysterious impression. The twine looks like rusty wire, but doesn't hang in a way wire could easily be made to, and some of it has hit the floor and smashed. It took the gallery attendant to explain it to me, and then I walked around seeing it a second time.
There are also two video installations in the gallery, something Gombrich in the seventies understandably doesn't touch on at all. (He includes photography only as a motivating force for painters). On the top floor, a fireworks display filmed from six angles simultaneously by drones, playing in silence and dimness on screens slanted away from each other in a long rectangular room so that there's a point from which you can see all of them, but it isn't obvious at first, and to stand there I'd have had to block the throughway. I walked in and thought I was going to walk right out again -- but I stayed, and became slowed down. It wasn't an experience with any describable content, really, except that I watched a fireworks display in a way that's usually impossible. A similar kind of playfulness to soaking twine in concrete because nobody recognises twine soaked in concrete.*
The other video installation, Baloji's Encounter 1, was based on a Pygmy wedding ceremony: far denser than anything else in the gallery, with music, with colour, with significances I couldn't read. Marriage and sex and colonialism, people in glorious costumes but not quite where they should be, the ceremony missing a participant, then taking place with a wall between the two of them, then burning, then subsiding into night waters. I want to go back to that one.
*I initially wrote 'concrete soaked in twine'. That would be a different exhibition. A big slab of twine-riddled concrete, partially chipped away? Twine in the footpath outside the gallery, endangering feet and rising into thoroughly impractical bike stands?
The Story of Art is a classic: it has sixteen editions, of which this is the thirteenth, and when I mentioned to my employer that I was reading an overview of art history for story research she said, "Is it Gombrich?" I can see why it's lasted. It was originally written for children, and is a best-case scenario of expert speaking to first learner. Every artwork it mentions, it illustrates -- not all in color, you can see Gombrich spending his color-plate allocation and deciding which points he can make well enough in black and white. The spine of the book is the story of realism, from Ancient Egypt to the Impressionists, and it's structured so that you can see why the artworks it discusses are amazing: the pivotal ones arrive in his story like culminations of all that came before, triumphant solutions to problems posed earlier -- only to be referred back to from ten pages further on as, not inadequate on their own terms, but inadequate on the terms they caused people to think in next. On the way, the book contains things like a simple description of why the Gothic style of architecture arose, (a rise I saw very clearly when travelling from Greece to Prague without any more idea why than 'they learned to use stone differently'), and by what stages perspective came about, how much it initially excited Renaissance artists, how long it took until they were sure what to do with it. How do you make beautiful compositions while also obeying the rules of three-dimensional space? Ask Raphael, a century later -- or just have fun watching Uccello have fun as he impeccably foreshortens fallen lances on an otherwise very odd-looking battlefield.
I both wish I'd read this book before I went to the galleries of New York and Prague, and am glad to have those galleries as reference points, so that I know what blazing reality lies behind the vague wash of Turner in illustration, and bear in mind that Cezanne, whose masterful achievement of four or five apparently incompatible things Gombrich describes for two solid pages, may not be as dull as he seems to me on the basis of his illustrations here.
Downsides: on the strength of this book, my art history student isn't going to know much beyond Europe. 'Primitive art' gets a chapter. (Gombrich starts out by saying 'I do not think that there are any wrong reasons for liking a statue or picture.' Without that basic attitude, his version of 'How shall we understand cave paintings? Let us turn for comparison to the art of primitive peoples of our own day' would be even worse, but that's in there). China gets praise but only six illustrations -- and it was a useful early calibration moment when Gombrich said "It may not be easy for us to appreciate the boldest of these works..." about the image in the book which I had up to that point found most powerfully evocative. I may need to get a hold of the book, written in response to this one, called Stories of Art.
...
I went to the Wellington City Gallery's new exhibition after finishing Gombrich. What did I find? No paintings, for one thing. Well, I tell a lie: one painting, a rectilinear spiderweb of wavering black lines. Where Gombrich was most useful to me was in thinking about how recent a development galleries are, and how recently art began to be done without commission, without inbuilt purpose. None of what was there seemed to be a continuation of quite the story he'd been telling, or else it's well on in the direction Gombrich's heart seemed not to tend, past the problems of representation into the question, what can this medium do with its materials? Gombrich touches on the playful possibilities of materials -- mentions painting as a way of seeing what can be done with paint as a substance -- but he doesn't dwell on it. It's one of the things I most often see in sculpture, when I visit this gallery: material wit, things that aren't what they seem to be, things created because no one's created them before. On the first floor, twine had been soaked in concrete and hung from rusty steel grilles, some of which were then swung down from the ceiling to hang from two corners only, or rest on the floor, after the concrete hardened. This gives an initially mysterious impression. The twine looks like rusty wire, but doesn't hang in a way wire could easily be made to, and some of it has hit the floor and smashed. It took the gallery attendant to explain it to me, and then I walked around seeing it a second time.
There are also two video installations in the gallery, something Gombrich in the seventies understandably doesn't touch on at all. (He includes photography only as a motivating force for painters). On the top floor, a fireworks display filmed from six angles simultaneously by drones, playing in silence and dimness on screens slanted away from each other in a long rectangular room so that there's a point from which you can see all of them, but it isn't obvious at first, and to stand there I'd have had to block the throughway. I walked in and thought I was going to walk right out again -- but I stayed, and became slowed down. It wasn't an experience with any describable content, really, except that I watched a fireworks display in a way that's usually impossible. A similar kind of playfulness to soaking twine in concrete because nobody recognises twine soaked in concrete.*
The other video installation, Baloji's Encounter 1, was based on a Pygmy wedding ceremony: far denser than anything else in the gallery, with music, with colour, with significances I couldn't read. Marriage and sex and colonialism, people in glorious costumes but not quite where they should be, the ceremony missing a participant, then taking place with a wall between the two of them, then burning, then subsiding into night waters. I want to go back to that one.
*I initially wrote 'concrete soaked in twine'. That would be a different exhibition. A big slab of twine-riddled concrete, partially chipped away? Twine in the footpath outside the gallery, endangering feet and rising into thoroughly impractical bike stands?
