Ideals & Idols

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.

• Part 1 Values in history: the tradition of general knowledge; in search of cultural history; the logic of Vanity Fair - alternatives to historicism in the study of fashions, style and taste; myth and reality in German wartime broadcasts; research in the humanities - ideals and idols. Part 2 Values in art: art and self-transcendence; art history and the social sciences; canons and values in the visual arts - a correspondence with Quentin Bell; a plea for pluralism; the museum - past, present and future; reason and feeling in the study of art.