248
FRANK KERMOOE
KERMODE:
Thank you very much.
Next I spoke with Ernst Gombrich of the Warburg Institute.
KERMODE:
Professor Gombrich, does the expression "anti-art" mean
anything at all?
GOMBRICH:
Well of course it means something. I think the people who
use it have a certain image or idea of what the word art stands for,
in our society. They think of uplift and philistinism and all these
things, and they think that they are against it.
:<.ERMODE:
But when they suppose that their art is--as it's been put–
cleansed of the past, is that a conception that you could entertain in
painting?
OOMBRICH:
No, of course I couldn't. Because by using the term anti-art
they show that they are related to something, even if only in opposition.
By using the very words they show that they are part of tradition and
naturally in every tradition there are things which are gradually being
discarded, but the continuity isn't therefore broken. The main carrier
of tradition is surely the language and a child who grows up in a
culture gradually absorbs something of that culture. In language, as
many linguists have shown, are embodied a very great number of
concepts and notions which we take for granted.
KERMODE:
This professed dislike of the past is characteristic, perhaps, of
this century,
is
it?
day I would not deny for a moment."
I have once more drawn attention to this passage in the preface to the
second edition. What else can I do? Should I point to the discussions on com–
munication and expression and on physiognomic perception now reprinted in my
volume,
Meditations on a Hobby Horse?
Or will it help if I say that I have also
explicitly denied that it makes sense to speak of "the essence of art," and that
1 happen to be aware of the existence of architecture, music and poetry? I should
have thought it was in the interest of the speaker's reputation as a fair polemicist
that he should have withdrawn or qualified his statement above, about what I
feel to be "the essence of art," but he has unfortunately refused to do so.
E.
H. Gombrich
Professor Gombrich has chosen to pick up a remark made in an informal
discussion. In New York art circ1e3 "illusionistic" and "representational" are
often used synonymously. Looseness of this kind should, of course, be avoided.
However, there is a line of thought in
Art and Illusion
which seems to me to
justify my statement th'at for Gombrich, "the illusionistic principle is the essence
of art."
One of the chief points of
Art and Illusion
is that art cannot copy nature
but produces "equivalents" of it. Thus Gombrich puts heavy' emphasis on the
fact that Constable, the "realist," bowed to existing "schema" for painting trees
