E H Gombrich Popular Books

E H Gombrich Biography & Facts

Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich (; German: [ˈgɔmbʁɪç]; 30 March 1909 – 3 November 2001) was an Austrian-born art historian who, after settling in England in 1936, became a naturalised British citizen in 1947 and spent most of his working life in the United Kingdom. Gombrich was the author of many works of cultural history and art history, most notably The Story of Art, a book widely regarded as one of the most accessible introductions to the visual arts, and Art and Illusion, a major work in the psychology of perception that influenced thinkers as diverse as Carlo Ginzburg, Nelson Goodman, Umberto Eco, and Thomas Kuhn. Biography The son of Karl Gombrich and Leonie Hock, Gombrich was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, into an assimilated bourgeois family of Jewish origin who were part of a sophisticated social and musical milieu. His father was a lawyer and former classmate of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and his mother was a distinguished pianist who graduated from the Vienna Conservatoire with the School's Medal of Distinction. At the Conservatoire she was a pupil of, amongst others, Anton Bruckner. However, rather than follow a career as a concert pianist (which would have been difficult to combine with her family life in this period) she became an assistant of Theodor Leschetizky. She also knew Arnold Schoenberg, Gustav Mahler, Hugo Wolf and Johannes Brahms. Rudolf Serkin was a close family friend. Adolf Busch and members of the Busch Quartet regularly met and played in the family home. Throughout his life Gombrich maintained a deep love and knowledge of classical music. He was a competent cellist and in later life at home in London regularly played the chamber music of Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven and others with his wife and his elder sister Dea Forsdyke, a concert violinist. Gombrich was educated at the Theresianum and at the University of Vienna, where he studied art history under Hans Tietze, Karl Maria Swoboda, Julius von Schlosser and Josef Strzygowski, completing a PhD thesis on the Mannerist architecture of Giulio Romano, supervised by Von Schlosser. Specialised in caricature, he was invited to help Ernst Kris, who was then keeper of decorative arts at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, on his graduating in 1933. In 1936, he married Ilse Heller (1910–2006), a pupil of his mother, and herself an accomplished pianist. Their only child, the Indologist Richard Gombrich, was born in 1937. They had two grandchildren: the educationalist Carl Gombrich, (b. 1965) and Leonie Gombrich (b. 1966), who is his literary executor. After publishing his first book A Little History of the World in German in 1936, written for children and adolescents, and seeing it become a hit only to be banned by the Nazis for pacifism, he fled to Britain in 1936 to take up a post as a research assistant at the Warburg Institute, University of London. During World War II, Gombrich worked for the BBC World Service, monitoring German radio broadcasts. When in 1945 an upcoming announcement was prefaced by the Adagio of Bruckner's seventh symphony, written for Richard Wagner's death, Gombrich guessed correctly that Adolf Hitler was dead and promptly broke the news to Churchill. Gombrich returned to the Warburg Institute in November 1945, where he became Senior Research Fellow (1946), Lecturer (1948), Reader (1954), and eventually Professor of the History of the Classical Tradition and director of the institute (1959–76). He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1960, appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1966 New Year Honours, knighted in the 1972 Birthday Honours, and appointed a member of the Order of Merit in 1988. He continued his work at the University of London until close to his death in 2001. He was the recipient of numerous additional honours, including Goethe Prize 1994 and Balzan Prize in 1985 for History of Western Art. Gombrich was close to a number of Austrian émigrés who fled to the West prior to the Anschluss, among them Karl Popper (to whom he was especially close), Friedrich Hayek and Max Perutz. He was instrumental in bringing to publication Popper's magnum opus The Open Society and Its Enemies. Each had known the other only fleetingly in Vienna, as Gombrich's father served his law apprenticeship with Popper's father. They became lifelong friends in exile. Work Gombrich remarked that he had two very different publics: amongst scholars he was known particularly for his work on the Renaissance and the psychology of perception, but also his thoughts on cultural history and tradition; to a wider, non-specialist audience he was known for the accessibility and immediacy of his writing and his ability to present scholarly work in a clear and unfussy manner. Gombrich's first book, and the only one he did not write in English, was Eine kurze Weltgeschichte für junge Leser ("A short history of the world for young readers"), published in Germany in 1936. It was very popular and translated into several languages, but was not available in English until 2005, when a translation of a revised edition was published as A Little History of the World. He did most of this translation and revision himself, and it was completed by his long-time assistant and secretary Caroline Mustill and his granddaughter Leonie Gombrich after his death. The Story of Art, first published in 1950 and currently in its 16th edition, is widely regarded as one of the most accessible introductions to the history of visual arts. Originally intended for adolescent readers, it has sold millions of copies and been translated into more than 30 languages. Other major publications include Art and Illusion (1960), regarded by critics to be his most influential and far-reaching work, and the essays gathered in Meditations on a Hobby Horse (1963) and The Image and the Eye (1981). Other important books are Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (1970), The Sense of Order (1979) and The Preference for the Primitive (posthumously in 2002). The complete list of his publications, E. H. Gombrich: A Bibliography, was published by Joseph Burney Trapp in 2000. Thought Psychology of perception When Gombrich arrived in England in 1936, the discipline of art history was largely centred around connoisseurship. Gombrich, however, had been brought up in the Viennese culture of Bildung and was concerned with wider issues of cultural tradition and the relationship between science and art. This latter breadth of interest can be seen both in his working relationship with the Austrian psychoanalyst and art historian, Ernst Kris, concerning the art of caricature and his later books, The Sense of Order (1979) (in which information theory is discussed in its relation to patterns and ornaments in art) and the classic Art and Illusion (1960). It was in Art and Illusion that he introduced the ideas of 'schemata', 'making and matching', 'correction' and 'trial and error' influenced by 'conjecture and refutation', in.... Discover the E H Gombrich popular books. Find the top 100 most popular E H Gombrich books.