The Sense of Order (Wrightsman Lectures 9) by Leonie Gombrich

The Sense of Order (Wrightsman Lectures 9) Reviews

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  Chris

  The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art by E.H. Gombrich
  
  E.H. Gombrich started his career as an art historian by straying from art history. As a student at the University in Berlin he was disappointed with Heinrich Wölfflin’s lectures, later published as Italy and the German Feeling for Form. (It is a disappointment that has stayed with him today to the point that he misquotes the title.
  
  He confesses: “I soon stayed away [from the lectures] in order to attend Wolfgang Köhler’s more exciting accounts of psychology.” The escape was significant for Gombrich: he has ever since been more at home in psychology than in aesthetics.
  
  Gombrich’s most famous book, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, had an important and provocative thesis that has been largely accepted; one might even say that it is now taken for granted. He dispelled once and for all the myth of the “innocent eye, the idea that the artist looks at the world and transcribes what he sees as best he can. Gombrich’s point of departure was a “hunch,” as he calls it, that he developed in a brilliant early essay, “Meditations on a Hobby Horse,” an investigation of the biological foundations of representation. He made the striking suggestion that representation was not, as was usually assumed, essentially an imitation of visual appearance, but a substitute for something one wanted; what counted most was not the appearance of the thing but its function. A stick can be made into a hobby horse because it can be ridden. After that, it can be made more and more like a horse by being given a head so the horse can see, reins so it can be controlled, and so forth.
  
  Art and Illusion described the way in which successive artists made their works into a more and more faithful resemblance of our visual experience of the world, an “imitation of nature” starting from schematic images. The book is not a history of art but an attempt to explain how the imitation of nature, or mimetic representation, comes about and how it progresses. The artist improves his picture by matching a given image (or schema) against what he sees and correcting it; the new image can again be improved. As Gombrich puts it, making always comes before matching.
  When Gombrich announced that he would take ornament as the subject of the Wrightsman lectures given at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1970, it seemed clear that this was to be a pendant to Art and Illusion. Now, after eight years of work, the publication of The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art makes the parallel explicit: “Thus the resemblance of this volume to Art and Illusion, both in the subtitles and in the organization, is intended to underline the complementary character of the two investigations, one concerned with representation, the other with pure design.” The assertion of this “complementary character” implies that the two books together cover the basic aspects of art.
  
  Gombrich’s work on “pure design” is partly informed by a faint distaste for modern art, not always well disguised. This is made obvious by his tendency to label all abstract painting as “experiments.” He writes on the first page of The Sense of Order: “It was perhaps inevitable that this interest [in representational skills] was sometimes identified with a championship of figurative as against non-objective art, all the more as I have criticized certain theories advanced in favor of these twentieth-century experiments.” It is a bit late in the day to apply the term experiment to the achievements of Mondrian, Kandinsky, and Pollock. While Gombrich certainly does not equate art and illusion, he does seem to feel that on the whole great art requires a balance between mimetic representation and design. In the epilogue “Some Musical Analogies” Gombrich launches a head-on attack on atonality where he gives full vent to his dislike of modern art.
  As I remember the lectures, they were extraordinarily polished in their composition, timing, and delivery, and they were greatly appreciated by the audience. Gombrich’s antipathy to modern art seemed more overt, his ideas more bluntly asserted than in the book, which has become quite different. Gombrich, always quick at discovering the faults in the arguments of others, is almost as adept at finding weaknesses in his own thought. In the published book he has now hedged his ideas with so many qualifications that the arguments have become involved and diffuse, the ideas often hard to follow and usually impossible to summarize. It is especially difficult to do justice to the wealth of observations and insights that enliven every page.
  
  The book begins with a sketch of the development of ideas on ornament and design from the neo-classicism of the eighteenth century until the first years of the twentieth; the time usually considered the beginning of modern art. Gombrich is principally concerned here with the relation between decoration and high art, and with the pervasive idea that ornament is immoral. He traces the condemnation of rococo design and decoration in general in neoclassical theory until the great Viennese architect Adolf Loos half humorously damned all ornament in his essay “Ornament and Crime.” In this famous manifesto of modern art, Loos explains that it is normal for primitive men to like ornament and for savages to be tattooed, but that in our civilized society only criminals have tattoos. An innocent man with a tattoo is only a criminal who has not had a chance to commit his crime.
  
  Gombrich is anxious to show that the theories of abstract art that emerged in the twentieth century derived from nineteenth-century discussions of ornamental design. While there is some truth in this, one should not forget that a conception of abstract art is implied and sometimes quite explicitly affirmed in the romantic theory of art articulated around 1800 by German critics and painters such as Tieck and Runge, and that it recurred throughout the century, being most powerfully restated by Symbolism. To insist that one stream of thought culminated in abstract art is tendentious and misleading. In practice, it was essentially landscape that was the laboratory of abstract art; in both Kandinsky and Mondrian the movement from landscape to abstraction can be followed step by step, and it bears little relation to the procedures of stylization used by the professional designers of late-nineteenth-century ornament.
  Having examined various theories of design, Gombrich then attempts to provide general definitions of the aims of the decorative artist and finds them in what he calls framing, filling, and linking. Framing consists of defining and stressing the field to be ornamented. Filling speaks for itself and linking is really an extension of filling. “Any regular lattice or symmetrical design is always capable of further development by the creation of links between its constituent elements. In this process a rich network of progressive intricacy can be seen to emerge….”
  The second part of The Sense of Order is devoted to the psychology of perception and its application to the way we perceive patterns and design. This is Gombrich’s favorite subject and in many ways the best part of the book. His theory of knowledge has been borrowed from his great friend Sir Karl Popper. Knowledge does not advance through the verification of a hypothesis, but through its invalidation. A hypothesis is held workable until proved wrong, in which case a more powerful one is required. “All French women are blond,” concludes the Englishman disembarking at Calais. He holds to this theory until he meets one French brunette, at which time he must build a more workable hypothesis.
  
  This method has been transported by Gombrich to the domain of perception. We unconsciously assume continuity and regularity. It is the irregularities, the breaks in continuity, that attract our attention and shatter our assumptions. Gombrich writes:
  We expect things not to change unless we have evidence to the contrary. Without this confidence in the stability of the world we could not survive. Our senses could not cope with the test of mapping the environment afresh every moment. They rather serve our internal representation, on which we enter certain observations and assumptions, with which we operate unless and until they are disproved. This is the application of the “Popperian asymmetry” which I foreshadowed in the Introduction. Our whole sensory apparatus is basically tuned to the monitoring of unexpected change.
  
  The theory of visual perception that took the camera for a model is, Gombrich persuasively assures us, clearly obsolete. Recent work on perception, upon which Gombrich relies, is based on information theory and takes a much more sophisticated apparatus as its model of explanation: the computer, programmed to process data and to detect irregularities and deviations from regular patterns. There are good reasons to believe that, like the model of the camera, this new model itself will eventually be superseded, but for the moment it certainly accommodates a great deal more observation and evidence than the old one. Gombrich gives fascinating examples of how his principles operate in the perception of shapes and patterns. In the case of the pyramid illustrated on page 19, for example, he comments:
  …the progressive diminution in the width of the steps is taken for granted. Now it is the identity of the two in the middle which breaks the sequence and attracts attention.
  What we call a “visual accent” must always depend on this principle….
  Gombrich then proposes to examine how his hypothesis, or tentative theory of perception, can illuminate the way we perceive designs aesthetically, the “feelings” of restlessness or repose, balance or instability induced by certain motifs. But he is aware of the jump he now takes when leaving the rudiments of perception and entering into even the simplest of aesthetic effects. He sees the danger both in the “subjective element”—different people will react differently—and in the fact that reaction to a test in this field is largely influenced by the giving of the test itself. Yet he is not entirely pessimistic. He writes:
  Benedetto Croce dismissed the experimental psychology of his day with the remark that if he were asked which shape of a rectangle he preferred for an envelope he would have to know whether it was to contain a love letter or a business letter. He was right, but only partly so. In fact, few people care about the shape of the envelope unless their attention is drawn to it. It is only after they have been asked that they may discover their preferred choice…. We do not claim, as do so many books on the aesthetics of design, that certain combinations of shapes or colours should or must be seen in any particular way. We remain aware of the fact that we are frequently asking leading questions and that these inevitably affect the subsequent response. Why should they not? They are part of the previous experience the subject brings to the pattern, but the answer may still tell us something worth knowing.
  
  In his analysis of effects, Gombrich realizes that he cannot deal with the perception of geometric configurations without some kind of mimetic interpretation. “We would be hard put,” he points out, “to decide in which of the categories to place one of the most frequent devices of ornamental design—the interlace.” This is a perfectly regular two-dimensional pattern which we irresistibly perceive as three-dimensional strips running behind or in front of one another. We have a natural tendency to read things into what we see, to interpret any shape as an image of something else.
  But, as we are shown in the next chapter, “Shapes and Things,” the repetition and the regular arrangement of representational motifs deflate their mimetic effects. A leaf motif can almost completely lose its naturalistic appearance by being repeated in a geometric arrangement. In the light of his theory of perception, Gombrich discusses the impact of patterns on our understanding of images, and the way a decorator can exploit our tendency to project images into shapes so that, for instance, the most indistinct suggestion of eyes or mouth induces us to see a face. Gombrich proposes some suggestive psychological and even biological explanations of these phenomena, but he prudently abstains from a coherent and complete theory of design.
  
  In the third part of his book, Gombrich takes an even greater speculative leap and tackles the general question of continuity and change in the history of art, what is often referred to as the problem of style. We generally believe that things made at a particular time in a particular place (seventeenth-century France, or Florence in the Renaissance) have a sort of family resemblance, sufficient for us to be able, when we see a picture or a snuff box, to say things like “That must have been made in Germany in the eighteenth century.” This familiar experience, which at first sight may seem innocuous enough, cannot be accounted for in any simple way and poses the most nagging problem for any theory of history. Furthermore, it is hard not to feel that the playful exuberance of rococo furniture, especially if compared to the grand severity of French furniture made fifty years earlier, tells us something about the society that produced it, that it does “express its time” and even in some way corresponds to the freedom and amiable audacity of a contemporary writer like Voltaire.
  
  The most sustained effort to account for the changing significance of styles was probably made around 1900 by the Viennese historian Alois Riegl, who had also, some years before, written what Gombrich and most other historians consider the finest work on the history of ornament. One of Gombrich’s concerns is to define his attitude to his great predecessor. “I cannot but regret,” he writes in his preface, “that my continued interest in the theories of one of the most original thinkers of our discipline has earned me the reputation of being hostile to this great man.” In the introduction to Art and Illusion Gombrich wrote that Riegl’s theory “weakens resistance to totalitarian habits of mind.” Such a statement might help to explain this regrettable reputation for hostility.
  
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  © The New York Review ‘The Sense of Sense’ by Henri Zerner
  Henri Zerner, Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard is the author of Renaissance Art in France: The Invention of Classicism and Écrire l’histoire de l’art: Figures d’une discipline.
  
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  Pure Soul

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