Criticism
Gombrich was sensitive to the criticism that he did not like modern art and was obliged to defend his position on occasion. He has also been criticized for taking what is now viewed as a eurocentric, not to say neo-colonialist, view of art, and for not including women artists in much of his writing on Western art. His answer to the latter was that he was writing a history of art as it was and that women artists did not feature widely in the West before the 20th century. He admired 20th century female artists such as Bridget Riley whose work was included in a revised edition of The Story of Art.
Read more about this topic: Ernst Gombrich
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)