Louis Rose. Psychology, Art, and Antifascism: Ernst Kris, E. H. Gombrich, and the Politics of Caricature.

Abstract

Louis Rose’s book Psychology, Art, and Antifascism: Ernst Kris, E. H. Gombrich, and the Politics of Caricature tells the multilayered story of the two twentieth-century Viennese art historians and psychologists Ernst Kris and E. H. Gombrich and of their unfinished project of a history of caricature, “a seminal . . . effort at bridging scientific research and humanist scholarship” (3–4). Kris and Gombrich’s attempt at integrating art history, the psychology of image making, and political analysis is set against the backdrop of the interwar Austrian Republic’s demise, the activities of exile intellectuals in World War II, and the rise of propaganda. By intricately linking intellectual, cultural, and political history, Rose’s study can itself be understood as “a model of integration” (4), not unlike the project that Rose portrays in his book. The book’s early chapters introduce the biographical and intellectual influences that would converge in Kris and Gombrich’s approach to caricature. Both scholars came from assimilated liberal Austrian-Jewish upper-middle-class families and were affected by the dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy and the political and intellectual crisis of the interwar Austrian republic. Kris’s career began with studies in late-Renaissance art history at the University of Vienna after World War I. As curator of Vienna’s venerable Kunsthistorisches Museum, Kris’s research in sixteenth-century “borderline art” set the stage for his turn toward psychoanalytic theory and practice (25); a further influence was the innovative cultural studies approach of the Warburg Institute, located in exile in England after 1933. Without fully reconciling his dual roles as museum curator and psychoanalyst, Kris, with his student and assistant Gombrich, “turned to caricature as a means of exploring the borderline regions of art history and psychological science” (46).