Page - 271 - in Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, Volume LIX

HOW GOMBRICH WILL BE REMEMBERED 271 must be based. Gombrich had a vast knowledge of the history of art, but for him it was means to an end, not an end in itself. And in fact, his own attempts to add to historical knowledge were rela- tively few and not always particularly convincing; but then it was not his primary concern to con- tribute to scholarship in this way. In his published conversation with Didier Eribon, Gombrich declared that he was “a mem- ber of the Vienna school of art history”.5 It was course his university education that encouraged him to consider a very wide range of artistic pro- duction and gave his approach to art history its particular flavour, because the problems that particularly fascinated him, concerning the psy- chological bases of representation, had also pre- occupied earlier scholars working there, above all Riegl and Loewy, although this is not to mini- mise his debt also to Schlosser, or for that mat- ter to Karl Bühler, whose ideas on psychology greatly interested him. Vienna set the agenda for his later work, a point that is underlined by the dedication of Art and Illusion, “To the Memory of My Teachers”, namely Emanuel Loewy, Julius von Schlosser and Ernst Kris. Recently James Elkins has pointed out that “Gombrich’s work is intellectually distant from contemporary art-historical and critical prac- tice.”6 This is obviously true, at least of art his- tory in the English-speaking world, and one can only agree that Gombrich showed little interest in gender studies, including feminism and queer theory, or in Lacanian psychoanalysis, Sartrean analyses of the gaze, postcolonial theory and newer manifestations of semiotics, to list some of the categories mentioned by Elkins; nor did Gombrich produce the staple of art-historical scholarship, the biographical monograph. If we ask whether and how he will be re- membered, it is difficult to believe that the issues that he chose to investigate will always seem as irrelevant or marginal as they are often consid- ered today. The production of art in all its forms is a very curious and distinctive human activity, and Gombrich’s work will surely long remain at the centre of any attempt to explain why it hap- pened and what purposes it serves, even if few scholars active today have the breadth of knowl- edge, the curiosity or the intellectual ability to provide credible answers to these questions. There are plenty of publications which take is- sue with aspects of his work, but it remains an unavoidable point of reference in any discussion of visual representation. I suspect that the clarity of Gombrich’s writings and his unsurpassed abil- ity to interest a non-specialist audience will also guarantee that many of his publications will con- tinue to be read. And if one can confidently pre- dict anything about events a hundred years from now, it is that on 30 March 2109 the bicentenary of his birth will be celebrated in this university. 5 Idem, A lifelong interest. Conversations on Art and Science with Didier Eribon, London, 1993, p. 40. 6 J. Elkins, Ten Reasons Why E. H. Gombrich Is Not Connected to Art History, URL: http://www.gombricharchi- ve.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/showcom4.pdf [20.04.2011].