On Art

...This is quite consciously an art of making rather than of matching, and it shares with the art of many cultures the impulse to create images and objects of force and significance without explicit reference to human reality...

...Plastics appear as sponge, or as alligator or damask, or as marble or flowers and trees...

...Gombrich's discussion of this problem is one of the most interesting aspects of his book, and it suggests much that is specially relevant to the art of our own time...

...A black and white moving image is a man speaking in Tokyo or in Paris or in space— sometimes even, by means of film, an illusion of an illusion...

...The habit of considering all art a mirror of life or nature leads viewers to see social and personal disorder reflected in the forms of contemporary art, and violence in its methods...

...Such assumptions show an inadequate knowledge of the processes of perception...

...It is a commonplace that the perfection of photography had important consequences for painting...

...My reason for calling attention to the book, however, is that its implications are striking, not only for art historians, but for the general experience of all art—and particularly for the experience of contemporary art...

...We can learn to do without frontal views and complete information, for instance, because we learn how to see highly complex cues for depth and dimensionality...

...But earlier expectations remain strong, and contemporary art is also expected to be concerned somehow with matching reality...

...Surely, social and personal disorder was not unknown during the brilliant efflorescence of illusionist art, nor has it been absent from societies whose art never attempted the matching of reality...

...Perception itself is the foundation of illusionist art, and the eye of the viewer participates in the creation of illusion...

...The immediate problem is to account for the history of style, because the Egyptians and many other peoples clearly indicate in their art that they had different images to transfer...

...The most ingenious mechanical processes can now present the illusion of almost anything at all...

...In other words, "making" comes before "matching...

...Sonya Rudikoff, who frequently writes on art, has contributed to Partisan Review and Commentary...

...It is against the background of modern experience that a book such as E. H. Gombrich's Art and Illusion (Pantheon-Bollingen, 465 pp., $10.00), subtitled "A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation,' has special meaning...

...The famous "innocent eye" would not only fail to see the world or art freshly, but, because of the way perception works, would not see at all...

...Plato was much disturbed by that power, thought it a danger to truth and knowledge, as dangerous as the ability of the poet to create the illusion of reality by narration...

...The "imitation" of nature in paint on a flat surface is in fact impossible...

...It is not even much discussed nowadays, unless mourned by those who perennially predict a "return to nature...

...there are tape recordings, high fidelity records, telephones, books, reproductions of paintings and sculptures, restorations and copies of ancient and modern artifacts...

...And who of them could have foreseen the astounding developments in modern techniques for creating illusion...

...Admittedly, too, illusionism is not a problem for contemporary artists, nor of much relevance to contemporary art...

...Professor Gombrich is an art historian at the Warburg Institute in London, and much of his discussion of style and representation is addressed to those who have a particular interest in these matters...

...Too great reliance on the mirror theory also results in a mystique of an expressive creative process isolated from the history of art and, more important, isolated from the activity of art...

...Consider the kinds of things available to us: In our world of everyday familiarity, there is television, radio, film, photography...

...And this is the world in which we talk about illusionism, the convincing representation of nature and human life which commanded such power in the art of the West...

...But much more remains to be noted: Modem experience is so intimately involved with illusion, so dependent on it, so entwined with it, that Plato would be bewildered and appalled at the unanticipated effects of idealism...

...by selection of detail...

...Yet, although illusionist art clearly needs the processes of perception and the development of skill to represent reality, we know that much of the world's art has been indifferent to the approximation of reality...

...by a specific kind of variation or correction of formulae and schemata, type and pattern...

...If art is a mirror, then apparently artists, recording their sensations, transfer retinal images to canvas...

...for some of the masters of past time, in fact, making was matching...

...instead, we see in patterns, perceive complex things without even looking for them, and endlessly supplement what we see by projection and expectation...

...The eye differentiates, structures, organizes, works by trial and error...

...And, when the matter of "imitation" in art is in question, perhaps we cannot be reminded too often that Aristotle spoke of the imitation of an action —not of life or nature or human reality—a kind of imitation which might involve more making than matching...

...by enlarging the range of visual expectations...

...they minimize the development of skill, influence and culture that is important for Vasari's view of the art of painting as one of progress and invention...

...Children, primitives, schizophrenic artists and others who do not work with the methods of Western illusionism are said to do the same, as are modern artists, who in addition are supposedly engaged in recording inner sensations...

...If art "imitates" anything, therefore, it is the nature of perception...

...Thus, when Professor Gombrich argues that the history of style in art suffers from inadequate knowledge about the psychology of perception, and then proceeds to examine the methods of illusionism in terms of data about visual perception and mental set, the common reader may not feel vitally involved in the quarrel, though he may learn a lot...

...Illusionism is the increasing skill to evoke reality by incomplete representation...

...They take too little account of the significance of the history of style and of the fact that art has a history at all...

...In place of representations of the human and natural world, contemporary art offers compelling images and forms which do not represent anything...

...Moreover, it uses materials which do not create the illusion of any substances other than themselves, and which even suggest a departure from the traditional materials of art altogether...

...This was long, long ago, before illusionism reached the height of its remarkable power to make appearance seem the reality...

...These are the assumptions which Gombrich questions, and for several reasons...

...The result is a failure to see the art in illusionist and non-illusionist work alike...

...Illusionist art saw the closest possible relation between these two activities...

...Further, even illusionism is not possible without the construction of forms, without experiments with visual schemata, without visual conventions...

...Illusionist pictures require the acceptance of cues and minimal patterns, and skill develops their range...

...We do not think about art as Plato did, and illusionism may never again have the power to make us wonder...

...Daily we are offered the illusion of the real, immediate existence of other times, persons, lives, events, objects, actualities, places...

...it sets up "hypotheses," resolves ambiguities, tests relationships, learns and perceives in terms of new learning...

...and they reveal an inaccurate sense of illusionism itself...

...Much of the discussion of art, for example, involves assumptions about art imitating nature...

...This difficulty is frequently handled by distinguishing between visual and conceptual art, between seeing and knowing: The Egyptians are said to have presented in their art not what they saw, but what they knew...

...Indeed, its history can be seen as the history of the dispensable: Van Eyck had to put in what Rembrandt could afford to leave out or indicate with only a brushstroke...

...Illusionism's distinctive characteristic is not exactness, according to Gombrich, but rather its capacity for suggestion...

...ON ART Illusions of lllusionism By Sonya Rudikoff Birds were said to be convinced by Zeuxis' painted cherries, and Zeuxis himself tried to pull aside a curtain which turned out to be a trompe-Voeil painting...

...To do so, however, is to miss the point of the distinction between making and matching, and to ignore the explicit intentional choice of emphasis which contemporary art makes...

...Plato distrusted illusion without even knowing the work of Giotto, Masaccio, Titian or Tintoretto...

...We do not wait for the mind to "process" its sensations...