Meditations On a Hobby Horse and Other Essays On the Theory of Art

by Gombrich, Leonie

• ISBN13: 9780714832456
• ISBN10: 0714832456
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1994-09-29
• Publisher: Phaidon Press

Summary

Originally published in 1963, this book was the first volume to be publishedn the author's long and distinguished series of collected essays. In it heddresses fundamental questions about the nature of artistic achievement, theriteria of artistic value, and the role of language in understanding andnterpreting images. These essays explore the problematic character ofetaphors, analogies, symbols, myths, conventions and traditions in art andrt-historical writing, and investigate the notions of representation,xpression, abstraction and illusion.

Author Biography

Ernst Gombrich was one of the greatest and least conventional art historians of his age, achieving fame and distinction in three separate spheres: as a scholar, as a popularizer of art, and as a pioneer of the application of the psychology of perception to the study of art. His best-known book, The Story of Art - first published 50 years ago and now in its sixteenth edition - is one of the most influential books ever written about art. His books further include The Sense of Order (1979) and The Preference for the Primitive (2002), as well as a total of 11 volumes of collected essays and reviews.

Gombrich was born in Vienna in 1909 and died in London in November 2001. He came to London in 1936 to work at the Warburg Institute, where he eventually became Director from 1959 until his retirement in 1976. He won numerous international honours, including a knighthood, the Order of Merit and the Goethe, Hegel and Erasmus prizes.

Gifted with a powerful mind and prodigious memory, he was also an outstanding communicator, with a clear and forceful prose style. His works are models of good art-historical writing, and reflect his humanism and his deep and abiding concern with the standards and values of our cultural heritage.