I got to about page four in the Gombrich interview. I think you can see by this interview why while I agree with a lot of what Gombrich has to say, it doesn't follow that it is either interesting or deeply relevant to the way I think about the arts.
Notice G elades just exactly how `moral values' can be made pictorial. Just exactly which values? Beauty, horror, betrayal, love. These all issue from an entirely psychological view of the arts. But paintings are not like novels or plays or poetry. They are entirely visual, and the most explosive of all visual values, is the presence of the image itself, as it hits you in face. That's what painters want, what they or at least I want, because I admire that feeling. On the other in what sense is the sheer presence of an image related to any sort of moral value? Well, IMHO, it isn't.
And speaking of moral values, go back and read the little bits on Caravaggio, then web surf to find a big reproduction of Caravaggio's Amore, or Love Vanquished. The raw homosexuality of that painting is so explosively sexual, that most viewers can not get beyond staring at Caravaggio's boy friend a flagante delicto. Notice all the objects in the painting, musical string instruments, the armor that cupid has taken off, the builder's framing square and compass, the manuscripts on the floor. The message is to hell with the arts of the mind, give me the body. It is an elaborate and sophisticated celebration of the world of the body over and against just the life and arts of the mind. And beyond that there is the tremendous use of pictorial space which the apparently awkward open crotch figure defines that electries the space. It's this use of the figure in space to activate the space with physical tensions, define it, carve it, that makes Caravaggio such a tremendous influence with the visual artists of the his immediate period. They had just never seen anything like it. Frank Stella wrote a very good book about pictorial space, I forget the title now, but look around for it.
Anyway Gombrich is obviously an old futty-duddy. Most academics are, and it is particularly annoying in the arts because the arts are almost always devoted in some fashion or other to the realm of the sensual, if not sex outright by other means. Try il Bronzino's Allegory of Love for another example of sensuality beyond bounds. In this case the use of pictorial space is terrible and the figures are forced into a confined boundary in impossible and very awkward poses.
I'll try to develop some of this later. I wrote a much longer post and then just clipped the top to get a response on Hayek. Gombrich and art are something of a side issue for me at the moment. I am trying to flesh out Leo Strauss's intellectual milieu of the period. Popper, Gombrich and Hayek were his immediate contemporaries and evidently he considered at least Popper an enemy. I decided it would a good idea to try to understand why. I think it has to do with Popper's early Marxist phase which he later revoltted against.
So they were to the left of Strauss, so to speak. This is interesting to me, since I suspect Popper at least was a straight middle of the road liberal. I assume the same for Gombrich. In any event what they all have in common besides a pathological fear of Hegel, is their interest in Greco-Roman antiquity as an intellectual model. They were all the product of the 19thC rise of neoclassicism and its encoding as a secular education.
More later.... Thanks for the interview site...
CG