Ernst Hans Gombrich

Didier Eribon

Professor E H Gombrich

"People know me as the author of The Story of Art who have never heard of me as a scholar. But many of my colleagues have never read the book. They may have read my papers on Poussin or Leonardo, but not that. It is a curious double life." Sir Ernst Gombrich is one of the very few men able to lead such a double life, as familiar to the general public as to academicians. Recently the French intellectual Didier Eribon engaged in a series of probing conversations with Gombrich, seeking to discover how his mind and attitudes had been formed during his early years in Vienna and how they developed after he emigrated to England in 1939. There, Gombrich wrote The Story of Art, his acclaimed introductory art survey, and became director of the Warburg Institute in London. The result of the dialogue between these two men is found in this fascinating and thought-provoking volume. Gombrich tells of reading, examining, pondering and talking to numerous historians, psychologists, artists, and philosophers - among them Erwin Panofsky, Karl Popper, Oskar Kokoschka, and Konrad Lorenz - about subjects ranging from art history to biology and zoology. The reader observes one of our century's most acute minds as he informally brings together all the themes that have preoccupied him for over sixty years - the "meaning" of paintings especially those of the Renaissance; the relation between representational art and perception; and the way in which our responses are conditioned by conventions, history, social pressures, and changes of taste. As undogmatic, skeptical, and wide-ranging as ever, Gombrich not only provides a brilliant account of his life's work but also makes us think anew about fundamental issues, provoking as many questions as he answers.

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