Ernst Gombrich Summary

Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich was a historian. Surprisingly, the type of history that he was interested in was mainly art. He went to a gymnasium school in Vienna named Theresianum. He studied in the Second Institute of Art History at the University of Vienna. He also completed a doctorate in the study of art history in this University. Just a while later, in 1936, he decided to write his first book; A Little History of the World. He wrote this book to educate children and teenagers. Sadly, the book got banned by the German Nazi organization for peacemaking, which the Nazis didn’t want at that time period. But luckily, before the book got banned, he already fled to Britain in 1939. In Britain he managed to publish more of his texts, which included: The Story of Art (1950), Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960), Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (1970), Symbolic Images (1972), The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (1979). Ernst Gombrich has received a lot of awards for writing these texts. Some of them are: The Balzan Prize for History and Art of the West, City of

This chapter in the history of mankind is so appalling and so shameful to us Europeans that I would rather not say anything more about it”. This just shows that Gombrich was being very selfish to the Americans, and he did not want to talk about the topic just because it created a bad visual on the Europeans. In my opinion, Gombrich should still talk about the shameful things which Europeans have done, not only the good things. If this type of sanitized, biased and Eurocentric view on history would be all we knew about the past, then this world would be in terrible state