wortmann on gombrich

Thomas Wortmann

Position Paper: E. H. Gombrich: Ambiguities of the Third Dimension

In the eighth chapter of his book �Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, E. H. Gombrich takes a closer look at the meaning of perspective and how it influences the way one see a painting.

As one grows up in a society, one is used to special conventions of correct perspectives. By creating a picture that can be seen as a reproduction of reality, art uses this behaviour. Gombrich asks the question, how someone can judge if a painter uses the right perspective because this would mean, that there is only one way of looking at the world. In fact, our sense of perspective developed in the fifteenth century is a scientific convention; it is merely one way of describing space and has no validity (247).

He then describes an experiment made by Adalbert Ames, Jr. In this experiment one has to look at three objects through peepholes. From that point of view the objects look like three chairs. But if one changes his or her position and looks again, one sees that only one of the three objects is actually a chair. The other two are simply illusions. Although there is only one actual chair, one sees three chairs when he or she looks through the peepholes again. Gombrich believes that this example reflects that a person has only one way of interpreting what he or she sees and that one is blind from other possible configurations. If one sees through a peephole, one does not know what is on the other side and so one tries to guess.

When artists try to deceive their audience by creating pictures that seem to be real (trompe lil) they rely on this ambiguity. Therefore, if one were to stand in front of a picture and take the point of view of the painter one cannot judge whether a picture is real. But several methods have been developed by the audience to solve this problem. The audience for instance tries to find out if a picture is real with a simple turn of the head. With this change of position one can get another point of view from where the painting turns into a flat surface and can be seen as an illusion.

In opposition to this kind of art Gombrich sees Cubism. He describes it as the radical attempt to stamp out ambiguity and to enforce one reading of the picture (281), because it uses the same tools as classic art does, but it doesnt create the illusion of reality. It is, in Gombrichs words an exercise in painting, not in illusion.

Following the ideas of Gombrich an interesting question could be how cinema, especially the architecture of the cinema tries to keep the viewers from changing their point of view to avoid the destruction of the illusion.

To what extend could Cubism, although the impulse behind it must have been an artistic one (282), have had an influence on politics or society if one reads the idea of the perspective as a result or even as an ideology?

Could one set the idea of perspective given by Gombrich into relation to Foucaults idea of a closed and repressive society of discourses?