Reflections on the History of Art: Views and Reviews ed. by E. H. Gombrich and Richard Woodfield (review)

I. Book Reviews Book Review Panel: Rudolf Arnheim, Eva Belik,John Bowlt,John W. Cooper,ElmerDuncan, Robert S. Iiznsdon, Alan Lee, Rimma Laman, J y TurnerLuke,John Mallinckrodt, David Parker, Clafford Pickover, Rosalinda Sartorti, David Topper,Stephen Wilson. REFLECTIONS ON THE VIEWS AND REVIEWS E. H. Gombrich and Richard Woodfield , eds. University of California Press,Berkeley and LosAngeles, CA, USA, 1987.256pp., illus. Trade. ISBN: 0-520-06189-6. Reviewed by Allan Shields, 6506JerseydakRoad , Mariposa, CA 95338, U.S.A. Editor Richard Woodfield has collected a wide-rangingset of Gombrich’spublished reviews about topics mostly in art history. Gombrich gave him a free hand in the choices. Woodfield is correct that there is a wealth of ideas, criticisms, theoretical discussions,factualdetails, scholarship and “alarge body of accumulated wisdom which surrounds the practice of a discipline”to be found in published reviews. In the case of a scholar of the stature of Gombrich, it is possible to argue, asWoodfield does, that such cumulativewisdom is “easilylost”from library holdingsand therefore republication for the benefit of historiansand students of art is warranted. The University of California Press agreed, though this work had alreadybeen published by the Phaidon Press, Ltd. (1983, a press that has publishedvirtuallyall of Gombrich’sbooks. Gombrich’soriginal reviews represented in this book were published in Museum, The Obsmer, TheJournal o f Aesthetics and Art Criticism, TheNew Yorkh i m of Books, Listener, TimesLiteraq Supplement,Revue a % L ’Art,and BurlingtonMagazine. One review dates back over 40years,but most are of more recent origins.This book is meant to supplement Gombrich’sThe S t q ofArt (1950) and his other 11 books on the subject,eight of them republications by Phaidon Press, of his essays. Illustrations have been added to augment the text. in saying that Gombrich’swisdom lodged in the review format is easily HISTORY OF ART: Assuming that Woodfield is correct lost from libraries (which I do not assume is correct), one must ask,Why republish reviews (twice),for reviews not only have a limited shelf life by virtue of physical liabilitiesbut are usuallyconsidered to be of casualand rather temporary value by scholars. For more serious debate and discus sion, give us essays, monographs, ‘revisitations ’,festschrifts. This book, therefore, is a compilation and republication of published reviews of published books and, ostensibly , this is a review of those reviewsa kind of meta-review, if I were to seriously critique their contents and argument. Instead, I ask a question: Why this book of Gombrich’sreviews? The new editor of TheJournal of Aestheticsand Art Criticismhas divided book reviews into twokinds: (1)book reviews, longer essay-type reviews, and (2) book notices, precis reports of a short paragraph or two. Because of the great number of publicationsworthy of review, editors have long sought a satisfactoryformat to allow the most works to receive notice without greatly enlarging thejournal. I know, as one who has written many reviews over the past 35 or more years, how diverse the form can be. Single-paragraph notices are not the natural metier of loquacious pundits. One work by Thomas Munro, I recall, required over 100unpaid hours to prepare the review, the ultimate review occupyingno morejournal space than lesser works. In this book, there are no notices and, it can be argued, few true ‘book reviews’ and that is the reasonthis book has value in the discipline. When Gombrich undertakes a (long,paid) ‘review’for the New Y d Review of Books, for instance,the book in ques tion furnisheshim a point of departure , usually early in the review, to expand on the topic with his own views, to write about related historical details, to debate the theory represented , etc. One often learns more about Gombrich’sviews than about those of the author whose book is reviewed . In short, Gombrich’s‘reviews’ are either expansive essays occasioned by the book, or what I call ‘truncated essays’essays that are not fully argued orjustified in their truncated form becausethe format is that of a review-an essay manque. (Not so incidentally,the New Ymk Review of Booksencouragesvery long reviews by its hand-pickedreviewers,not a common indulgence byjournal editors!) There is a wealth of material in this retrospective by...