OF COURSE all the central European intellectuals knew each other.
Btw for all his limitations Gombrich -- Gombo, as my old Ren-Ref history teacher Tony Grafton used to call him -- was a very great historian, and the leader of a school of great art historians, the Warburg School.
Gombo himself is sort of the art-historical equivalent of the New Criticism in literature (Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks), which called for exacting attention to the text and its formal structure and to hell with any wider context. This produced, incidentally, some absolutely superb close readings of literary works. (As I discovered studying with Straussians, they picked up thus trick or invented in parallel; it's not a bad tool to have in your kit bag, especially if you are a lawyer!) Gombo read painting the same way, showing you things you'd otherwise never have seen by looking very carefully in the context of a deep knowledge of lots of other paintings. His books are beautiful, and beautifully written.
Not all the Warburgers was so formalistic as Gombo. One thinks of Michael Baxendall (sp?), whose early 70s book on painting in Italy during the plague is a classic of social history, though not Marxist. Or in a sense Tony Grafton himself, not an art historian although he did write a book on Alberti, but definitely deeply marked by Warburg training -- and both alert to social history and class analysis and not in principle at all hostile to Marx and Hegel. Though Hegel is one of the few things I venture to say that Tony knows nothing about.
--- Dennis Claxton <ddclaxton at earthlink.net> wrote:
> At 07:30 AM 4/7/2008, Chuck Grimes wrote:
>
>
> >This weekend, while reading something or other, I
> discovered that
> >Ernst Gombrich, the art historian, Karl Popper the
> philosopher, and
> >Friedrich Hayek the economist all knew each other
> and were
> >friends. Their shared intellectual connection was
> none other than a
> >profound distaste for Hegel and of course
> >Marxism.
>
>
> That explains this exchange from an interview with
> Gombrich in
> ArtForum. I never understood where this disdain
> came from. Gombrich
> also speaks here as if he never really read
> Benjamin's essay:
>
>
>
> >The most frequently referred to essay in American
> art criticism is
> >probably Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the
> Age of Mechanical
> >Reproduction." I don't think you ever mention it.
> >
> >EG: No, because I think it's absolutely wrong from
> beginning to end.
> >The reason is quite simple. A Rembrandt etching is
> also a mechanical
> >reproduction.
>
>
> The way you describe your initial exposure to art
> history it doesn't
> sound like Benjamin was the most quoted at the time.
>
>
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_n6_v34/ai_18163694/pg_6
>
>
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>
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