Sons of Goethe: E.H. Gombrich

How the art historian used both the lessons of the ancient world and Goethe's color theory to build up his thesis on the evolution of his field.

It is difficult to compare E.H. Gombrich to any other figure in the English speaking world, because we use “art historian“ as the punchline to a joke about college degrees. The name John Ruskin (or for that matter, Giorgio Vasari) may ring a few bells to a handful as a decent comparison, but familiarity with his name may admittedly eclipse those who already recognize Gombrich’s. Overseas, I would estimate his fame to be about on par with Howard Zinn, if we consider a David McCullough-type to be a “celebrity” historian. Naturally, influence and popularity are two independent metrics, and ought not be conflated. Many in the much maligned discipline of art history respect Gombrich for the general attention he’s brought to the field, but also specific connections he has made to the psychological development of art across history. In short, the catchphrase “making comes before matching” summarizes his outlook on the way stylistic interpretation of the natural world evolved throughout history. That is to say, art has developed independently through cultures (rather than having cave paintings match real animals and the like) because artists develop an image of the world around them and work off that eidolon, rather than directly painting reality. This development of the artistic process continued as disciples refined smaller aspects of what their teachers had mastered. This theory, among others, led him to win the Goethe prize in 1994. After artists were able to master truly realistic images not only in paint but with photography as well, the art world began to seek to depict “deeper” truths, either through abstraction or on the emotional plane. For this reason, his research often gave special attention to the peculiarities of both caricatures and optical illusions. 

On a personal note, my passion for history may have been snuffed out had it not been for this book. I’d had a keen interest in the subject during my ancient history course in sixth grade (I fondly remember baking baklava as my contribution to a group project on the Peloponnesian war), but I got stuck with an awful teacher for the next two years of middle school. If I had associated history with cold, rote memorization alone as she had wanted, I’d have quickly lost interest. Before my interest in Goethe and German, and even before Latin turned from a passionate fling to a lifelong relationship, E. H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World acted as a touchstone for my freshman year history class. As Gombrich’s granddaughter recommends in the preface, it wasn’t our sole textbook, but instead we referenced it as the teacher borrowed from other sources to teach the class. The main draw of the work is its simple prose that aims to tell history in the same way one would tell a story. This fabulization boils difficult concepts down enough that young readers can understand them, without stooping so low as to talk down to them in a way that would put off who we’ll call lapsed students of history. Hard dates for events are kept to a bare minimum and are never asked to be memorized. Hustlers have tried to squeeze “important” history down into a few hundred pages to sell books before, but the magic Gombrich does with a little bit of extra space turns a sprint through a garden into a meandering. How? By slowing down the pace and taking the time to smell the roses, so to speak.

It’s worth pointing out that by trade, E. H. Gombrich was an art historian, not a general historian. Goethe’s field of study was both wide and deep, but art in particular was more of a hobby of his than a true educational pursuit. He was known to sketch occasionally; three of the seven publicly collected drawings are housed in the British Library, but his thoughts on specific artists are scattered throughout his autobiographical works (e.g. Italienische Reise) and poetry. Luckily, Gombrich himself compiled many of the opinions Goethe expressed in an academic journal article for Art History.¹ Some of the connections made to the German master on this blog are nonlinear, spiritual, or otherwise assumed to be true, but here we have six pages of acute knowledge of collated opinions, and Gombrich’s opinions on those opinions at that. At the stage of Goethe’s life that a significant portion of these excerpts were taken from, the concept of Weltliteratur and the worldly attitude that he’s best known for are years out into the future. It’s fascinating to see him from a perspective where he has notions of a fabricated hierarchy of culture, and the displeasure he has for the perceived “takeover” of Francophilia in his homeland. Gombrich further notes the unintentional hypocrisy of Goethe’s praise of Gothic culture while denigrating French influence. Much later on, he recounts his preferences of one style of art over another as one would passionate flings in the poem “Modernes.” Not necessarily will one appreciate Jan van Eyck at the same time they enjoy Phidias, his example goes, but that doesn’t mean one has to have eyes for one beauty alone, at least in the art world.