“There really is no such thing as Art,” is how one of the greatest and most assured of all art histories opens. “There are only artists.” E.H. Gombrich was a Viennese Jew who relocated to Britain in advance of Hitler’s annexation of Austria and remained there for the rest of his life. One of the most distinguished scholars of the 20th century, he had an unparalleled gift for expressing complex ideas in enchantingly plainspoken terms. To read The Story of Art, first published in 1950 and updated periodically, is like listening to the conversation of an impossibly learned but lighthearted old friend as he leads you from the cave painters to post-Modernism. (It may have helped that Gombrich dictated the book.) Above all, he tells us, in every era, the great artists arrived at new ways of seeing. “The Egyptians had based their art on knowledge,” he writes. “The Greeks began to use their eyes. Once this revolution had begun, there was no stopping it.”
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