Category: Quotations

Posts which comprise of a quotation only.

The Story of Art – first read over

1 week and 6 days later I’ve completed the first read-through of The Story of Art by Ernst Gombrich. Which is a lot faster than I expected, mainly because the wealth of photography makes it seem like a much longer book at first glance.

Reading the lie of the page

. . . the original principle of keeping the illustrations before the reader’s eye while studying the text . . .1

Gombrich prides himself on illustrating every work of Art within a page or two of it’s mention in the text. Conversely, a full page of text usually indicates extended discussions on the social or theoretical background to the works. As a student of Art History this was quite a useful feature to keep an eye out for.

1. Ernst Gombrich, The Story of Art (London: Phaidon, 1950; 16th edition, 1995; reprinted 2005), p. 12

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Dear Edward . . .

. . . Today I should just like to draw your attention to one of the courses you will be attending, namely the Core Course – Histories of Art, which will introduce you to approaches and concepts in the History of Art and to the newer developments in the field described as Visual Cultures.

In preparation for the Core Course I’d like to ask you to read Ernst Gombrich’s Story of Art. This is a widely available survey of the history of art and has been translated into many languages. . . . Let the book inspire you to look at art works, to go to museums, to read other texts. But read the book from a critical distance. Please keep a kind of notebook or diary while you are reading. . . .

Letter from Astrid Schmetterling, Programme Leader, Postgraduate Diploma in Contemporary Art History, Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths College, University of London, 19 July 2006

It surprises me that I’ve only read one piece by Ernst Gombrich, and none of his books. I’m sure that he must have been on the reading lists for the courses I’ve taken, but something like arrogance has meant I’ve avoided him. I was probably thinking I had surpassed his writings. However, beginning this course has encouraged me to closely study my knowledge with a critical eye and I’ve come to realise it has some rather large holes and Gombrich is one of them.

So now I hold it in my hands and the sheer size of this brick of a book causes me to make certain pessimistic projections about the time it will take to read. I’m quite a slow reader, and I tend to want to read books twice, once skimming and then again with a more intense concentration, marking and annotating as I go. All this takes time. And I feel like time is precious on this course, so I may have to develop new ways of reading to speed things up.

On a related note, the conversational tone of the book makes me impatient. The storytelling conceit in itself slows the pace.

It’s also difficult to get away from the narrative style presenting the information as a seemingly natural progression from the past to the present. It implies a development towards fulfillment or completion, relegating past art to a rôle of support act to the latest works (I’m out of my depth here but would ‘teleology’ describe this accurately? Hegelianism?). Gombrich, in his preface to the first edition of the book guards against many of the criticisms that have been raised against the work, and says this regarding narrative:

. . . the appreciation of this intentional difference [the urge to be different] often opens up the easiest approach to the art of the past. I have tried to make this constant change of aims the key of my narrative, and to show how each work is related by imitation or contradiction to what has gone before. . . . There is one pitfall in this method of presentation which I hope to avoid but which should not go unmentioned. It is the naïve misinterpretation of the constant change in art as a continuous progress. . . . But we must realize that each gain or progress in one direction entails a loss in another, and that this subjective progress, in spite of its importance, does not correspond to an objective increase in artistic value.

Also, the title on the dust-jacket carved in stone – are these meant to be the tablets of Moses? Or is that just popular culture telling me that’s what they should look like?

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Grant H. Kester—Dialogical Art

El Projecto Milagro typifies dialogical practice: Crujido’s goal was not to shock or improve her collaborators, and although the project involved the production of a physical object, its intended audience consisted of the community of laborers with whom Crujido collaborated. Moreover, the form of the piece, the efficiency with which it responded to a specific aspect of the workers’ experience, was founded on, and preceded by, a process of dialogue and collective exchange. Although the project made use of Crujido’s skills as a sculptor (in the design and fabrication of the concrete forms), it required an equally important capacity for active listening and empathetic identification, a willingness to let the laborers guide her, rather than an imposition of her own a priori critical or formal values on them.

Kester, Grant H. Conversation Pieces: Community and Conversation in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004)

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Foucault M.—Manet, Flaubert—Museums, Libraries

Déjeuner sur l’Herbe and Olympia were perhaps the first “museum” paintings, the first paintings in European art that were less a response to the achievements of Giorgione, Raphael, and Velázquez than an acknowledgement (supported by this singular and obvious connection, using this legible reference to cloak its operation) of the new and substantial relationship of painting to itself, as a manifestation of the existence of museums and the particular reality and interdependence that paintings acquire in museums. In the same period, The Temptation was the first literary work to comprehend the greenish institutions where books are accumulated and where the slow and incontrovertible vegetation of learning quietly proliferates. Flaubert is to the library what Manet is to the museum. They both produced works in a self-conscious relationship to earlier painting or writing that remains indefinitely open. They erect their art within the archive. They were not meant to foster the lamentations—the lost youth, the absence of vigor, and the decline of inventiveness—through which we reproach our Alexandrian age, but to unearth an essential aspect of our culture: every painting now belongs within the squared and massive surface of painting and all literary works are confined to the indefinite murmur of writing.

Michel Foucault, “Fantasia of the Library,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), pp. 92-3.

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