A great scholar who understood the need for order in art
PAUL JOHNSON
Ernst Gombrich taught me more about art than any other writer I have read. He did not have Ruskin's astonishing descriptive power, or his philosophical imagination. He could not lecture with the dazzling skill of Kenneth Clark, whose pyrotechnics on `Rumbrunt' and `Tintorett' I was lucky enough to hear at Oxford. But Gombrich came closer than anyone else to analysing the actual process of painting, the relationship between the subject, the eye, the brain and the hand. He treated art more as a physical process than as an aesthetic one, concentrating particularly on the way we, and artists, see things — a much more complex matter than most people think. Gombrich was never afraid to turn to the scientists. And they have much to teach about art. Patrick Trevor-Roper's superb book, The Work! Through Blunted Sight, reminds us that few artists have perfect vision, and that weaknesses in sight have a perceptible effect on their work. Gombrich was interested in the eye, too, but still more so in visual psychology: he learnt a great deal from the work of wartime experts who tried to improve the performance of night-fighters in tracing targets, and of Fleet Air Arm pilots landing on an aircraft-carrier in high seas and difficult visual conditions.
Much of this knowledge went into Art and Illusion, perhaps his masterpiece, a highly original work which does not conceal the fact that drawing and painting are fundamentally a series of tricks, invented, added to and passed on over the ages, to persuade the collector that what he sees are not scrawls and colours on a two-dimensional paper or canvas, but the real thing. Gombrich had a uniquely wide range of references of art objects from all centuries and cultures. He must have had an astonishing memory, too, because not only was he able to write his Story of Art without access to a major library; he also seemed able to summon up instantly any object he had ever seen, to illustrate the next step in his argument. He was fertile, too, in identifying the physical aids artists have used over the centuries to supplement their natural and trained skills of eye and hand.
I would have liked to have known his opinion of David Hockney's recent book, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, which has raised such a fuss in the papers. This is a wonderfully clever piece of work, and a good read, but I am sceptical of its claims. From my knowl
edge of artists (and I was practically born in a studio), I think that most make little use of gadgets, partly from pride and purity of craftsmanship, partly because they can't be bothered with technology and find that the mechanics of visual aids restrict their freedom to go at things with a dash; in art, selfconfidence is everything, and it is not encouraged by copying equipment, however sophisticated. Few artists are as puritanical as my father, who would not allow a camera in the house. On the other hand, fewer still go as far as John Varley's gifted brother Cornelius, who became so fascinated by artists' aids that he gave up painting and became a manufacturer of optical instruments.
What is surprising is that Gombrich, so far as I know, never went in for drawing and painting himself. All the same, his The Story of An gives the impression that it is written from inside the artist's head, as well as the critic's. In general, I think the practice of art is an enormous asset in helping those who write about it to penetrate its arcana. So many aspects of art are physical and practical, as anyone who has seen a sculptor's studio-foundry will realise. In my field, watercolours, accessibility to the subject from exactly the right viewpoint, a place or stool to sit on, another handily situated to hold your paints, brushes and water, whether you have a portable easel or not, the position of the sun, the changeability of the weather, whether people try to talk to you while you are at it — all these, and other, factors help to determine whether you produce a good picture or not. The immense trouble that Ruskin took to become a superb draughtsman, and a sensitive colourist, too — quite how good he was has been appreciated only in the last 20 years or so — gave him an insight into the work of the masters that he could not have obtained by any other means.
I have just completed an immense book, which I call A New History of Art, tracing its evolution from cave paintings to the beginning of the 21st century. It is so big that, in order to keep down its bulk and price (it will have hundreds of illustrations), I may be forced to cut it by 10 per cent, or 40,000 words. But in writing almost every page I found that my experience in reducing what I see to a two-dimensional oblong came in useful. Practising art also prevents the writer from treating artists, even the greatest of them, like gods. They are craftsmen and (if they are lucky) businessmen, making a usual
ly precarious living, and daily confronted by mundane problems of time and motion, supply and output, productivity and finish, not least getting the things sold at a reasonable price. Michelangelo was like all the rest: that Sistine ceiling was not done by magic, but by muscle-power and sweat, in great discomfort and sometimes danger, with every kind of corner-cutting to raise the rate of progress and finish that vertiginous and horrible job.
Gombrich well understood this side of art, even though he never painted, because he had a powerful and sympathetic imagination. I think I have virtually everything he wrote in English, all of it good, much outstanding. One of his best books is The Sense of Order, which dwells on the way art produces humanist order out of the natural chaos of the world, and so helps us to understand it. I wrote an enthusiastic review of this work and received a delightful letter from him in which he said that I had written the only notice he had seen that properly understood what he was trying to do.
I have thought for many years about the ordering function of art, and my studies have led me to the conviction that art, in this capacity, was one of the earliest human skills, coming before speech, let alone writing of course. As such, it is the ultimate bedrock of civilisation. An instinct for order, an appreciation that it is essential for us to live the good life in communities, is the beginning of wisdom. That is why, for instance, it is so necessary for us to fight and win the current war against terrorism. I argue in my book that it was art that led us to God, the supreme orderer, and that art, by mastering chaos, has a supreme moral purpose: without it, as without belief in God, we are no more than very clever — and dangerously self-destructive — animals. Hence, art designed to increase the natural chaos, as so much of contemporary work is, fails; is, in fact, counter-art, and a source of moral corruption. If I produce a landscape where this ordering process is missing or clumsy, as happens all too often, I am sickened by failure, and start again. But the failure is itself instructive, and, having painted since the age of three and being now 73, I am at last beginning to understand order in art. Readers often express the wish to see my work. They may like to know that it is on show for the next fortnight at the Piers Feetham Gallery, 475 Fulham Road, London SW6 1HL.
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