NOTES
- James Hall, “Older and Wiser: How Gombrich cleared the ground for an appreciation of primitive art,” The Times Literary Supplement, October 18, 2002, 4. I am grateful to Robert Dale for bringing this article to my attention.
- E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion. A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, London: Phaidon Press, 1956, 328.
- E. H. Gombrich, The Preference for the Primitive. Episodes in the History of Western Taste and Art, London: Phaidon Press, 2002, 203: “Later I found in Cicero confirmation of the hypothesis which I had presented to the psychoanalysts: namely than an excess of sweetness is felt to be cloying, and that we tend to mobilize our defences against what is too obviously seductive.”
- ibid., 7, quoting from Cicero, De Oratore III.xxv.98.
- ibid., 72. Goethe's 1772 essay, Von Deutscher Baukunst, in which this was written was published in Herder's anthology, Von Deutscher Art und Kunst, einige fliegende Blatter, 1773.
- ibid., 115. The qualities they singled out were “noble simplicity” “firm characterization” and the absence of “bravura of the brush.”
- ibid., 75, quoting from Von Deutscher Baukunst.
- For reasons why Smith's theory of the “formalesque” was untenable, refer Fay Brauer, “Hegelian History, Wölfflinean Periodization and ‘Smithesque Modernism’,” Art History, Volume 24, Number 3, June 2001, 449–456.
- ibid., 203: “Having travelled along a similar route, we can only endorse this verdict…”.
- Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, London: Pandora, 1981.
- The Preference for the Primitive, 177.
- ibid., 191.
- ibid., 200.
- Stephen F. Eisenman, Gauguin's Skirt, London: Thames and Hudson, 1997.
- The Preference for the Primitive, 237. Patricia Leighten, “The White Peril and l'art nègre: Picasso, Primitivism and Andcolonialism”, The Art Bulletin, 72, December 1990; Mark Antliff/Patricia Leighten, Cubism and Culture, London: Thames & Hudson, 2001.
- Hal Foster, “The Expressive Fallacy” and “The ‘Primitive’ Unconscious of Modern Art or White Skin, Black Masks”, in Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics, Bay Press, 1985; James Clifford, “Histories of the Tribal and the Modern”, Art in America, April 1985.
- The Preference for the Primitive, 261: “Certain developments in the history of arts, and in other fields, can best be seen as the results of competition, with rivals outbidding each other, leading to the dominance of given aspects and the neglect of others.”
- ibid., 261.
- Art and Illusion, 248.
- The Preference for the Primitive, 297.
- ibid., 268.
- ibid., 279: “We can no more expect every human being to be born with this capacity than we can expect everybody to be able to construct and use a photographic camera.”
- The Gombrich family cook, Elise, presented Ernst on his fourteenth birthday with a drawing of him at his cello lesson. Some seventy years later, Gombrich writes about this drawing; “It is obvious that Elise in her drawing failed to do justice to this intricate complexity and that the same is true of the majority of pictorial styles anywhere on the globe.” Ibid., 280.
- ibid., 271: “Once we understand the true complexity of this achievement we shall cease to be surprised that it was the fruit of gradual developments.”
- ibid., 288.
- ibid., 297.
- The Preference for the Primitive, 191.
NOTES
- As opposed to the pre-war South Island-dominated canon that centred on Christchurch and Dunedin from the 1890s to the 1950s and was extensively promoted by Charles Brasch through his literary magazine Landfall.
- Art New Zealand, 94, Autumn 2000.