When World War II began, Gombrich served as a 'radio monitor,' working for the British Broadcasting Corporation as part of the war effort. It was largely due to Kris's urging and his recommendation of Gombrich to the director of the Warburg Institute that Gombrich moved to London in 1936. The rise of Nazism in Germany, however, interrupted the project, and Kris encouraged his Jewish assistant to leave Austria. Another important influence in the life of young Gombrich was Ernst Kris, who asked Gombrich to help him write a book on caricature which incorporated the work of Freud. At the university, he studied with the great art historian, Julius von Schlosser.

Gombrich said that he made his decision because 'art was a marvelous key to the past' ( The Essential Gombrich). Leonie Gombrich was also well-acquainted with the great modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg and Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis.Īlthough the atmosphere in his home led to his development as a thinker, Gombrich did not follow his mother's footsteps into music but chose rather to study art history at Vienna University. Indeed, Adolf Busch, the leader of the Busch Quartet, was a frequent visitor to the Gombrich home. Gombrich credits his intellectual development to the music in his home. Gombrich, a lawyer, and Leonie Hock Gombrich, a pianist. Author BiographyĮrnst Hans Josef Gombrich was born in Vienna, Austria, on March 30, 1909, to Karl B. Thus, serious students of art and art history find Art and Illusion an important and necessary part of their education. While art critics and historians have developed new ideas about representation since the first publication of Art and Illusion, Gombrich and his ideas continue to be a mighty force. Gombrich calls this theory 'making and matching.' At the heart of his theory is the notion of 'schemata,' that is, the idea that the artist 'begins not with his visual impression but with his idea or concept' and that the artist adjusts this idea to fit, as well as it can, the object, landscape, or person before him or her. In Art and Illusion, Gombrich poses this essential question: 'Why is it that different ages and different nations have represented the visible world in such different ways?' Throughout the pages of the book, Gombrich attempts to address this question using science, psychology, and philosophy to help formulate his answer.

Indeed, he not only revised the text and wrote a new preface for the second edition of the book published in 1961, he also wrote a new preface for the 'Millennium Edition' published in 2000, in his ninety-first year. Gombrich continued to advocate many of the ideas put forth in this book throughout his life. Critics generally agree that this volume, among Gombrich's myriad publications, is his most far-reaching and influential work. Those lectures became the book Art and Illusion. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1956. Following the publication in 1950 of his incredibly popular book, The Story of Art, Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich consented to give the A. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial RepresentationĪrt and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, published in 1960, is one of the most influential books written during the twentieth century on the subject of art.

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