Art, Illusion and Children's Picture Books

Abstract

Art, Illusion and Children's Picture Books Geraldine DeLuca (bio) Art historians of earlier periods saw the history of art as the ever-increasing ability of artists to render nature faithfully. In Art and Illusion, E. H. Gombrich suggest that it is actually the history of artists imitating other artists, relying on the vocabulary of forms available to them-conventionally called schemata-and by a slow process of observation, correction,and experimentation, from time to time breaking out of the "prison of style" (p. 320) to create what we recognize as a new vision. "The conclusion seems to me inescapable," Gombrich writes, "that the memory that performs this miracle [of creating great art] is very much a memory of pictures seen" (p. 314). To illustrate the point, he quotes the English landscape artist Constable, whose work Wivenhoe Park serves as a kind of touchstone throughout the book, making a notation to himself about a scene he has just sketched. The artist writes, "Fine, blowing day, tone very mellow, like the mildest of Gaspar Poussin and Sir George Beaumont, on the whole deeper toned than this drawing" (p. 315). Struggling to solve the problem of how to render a lightning-filled sky, Constable comes upon a painting by Cuyp which he says is "so much like nature that I wish I had seen it" before finished his own lightning filled sky in his Salisbury Cathedral (319). The discoveries that the great artist makes are obviously at the heart of what we think of as artistic genius, and Gombrich's work explores this process of discovery. But he is as much concerned with demonstrating how closely shaped each artist is by the tradition from which he learns his art. The schemata given to the artist by his or her forebears delimit what he sees, so that while he studies nature, he sees what he has been taught by other painters to see. A Chinese landscape artist working on an English landscape, Gombrich shows, will paint it in terms of the schemata of Chinese art, and the resulting painting will look Chinese (p. 85). Quoting Nietzsche, Gombrich observes that the artist tends "to see what he paints rather than to paint what he sees" (pp. 85-86). There are also functional differences that account for the differences in what an artist creates. The Greeks, according to Gombrich, developed a more naturalistic art than the Egyptians out of the Greek interest in narrative, in particular moments rather than eternal states. To illustrate narratives, the Greeks had to individualize, fill in details, interpret. Likewise, their art demanded "imaginative reconstruction," a particular response to particular details, from its audience. Byzantine art, with its retreat from the secular back to the religious, to the "what rather than the how," moved away from naturalism to a more static, allegorical form of art, representing internal and eternal conditions rather than moments in time. Gombrich discusses the Renaissance discoveries in the handling of perspective, traces the fascination of artists with optical illusions, and points out that the perspectives with which we find ourselves so comfortable depend largely on contextual clues and often involve degrees of distortion. He explains how artists learn to use optical illusion, to adapt their rendering of reality by taking into account the fact that simple, logical copying will often lead to what the eye will perceive as inaccuracies. In certain contexts, for example, two parallel lines will appear to be coming together, and the artist must adapt for such perceptual phenomena. [End Page 21] As this summary suggests, Gombrich is not primarily interested in telling us why Rembrandt or Constable moves us, or what their vision tells us about the nature of human experience. Rather, he is concerned with defining artistic genius in terms of the nature of the perceptual problems the artist must solve. He is interested in the kind of mind it takes, for example, to anticipate what will happen to a color just laid onto a blank canvas when that canvas has been filled with other colors, or to understand, as Cézanne did, that to make a mountain appear as massive as it does in nature, one must distort by heightening the...