What Is Art? Gombrich, Popper and Anderson

Gombrich: The search for objectivity

Two young émigrés who fled Vienna just before the Second World War were the philosopher of science Karl Popper and the art historian Ernst Gombrich. In London they became lifelong friends, later knights, and members of the Queen’s exclusive coterie—of twenty-four—the Order of Merit. Together they attempted to develop a realist solution to the problem of objectivity in aesthetics. Gombrich applied a Popperian understanding to try and avoid foundering on the rocks of relativism. Does this enable him to navigate past the shipwrecks of Tolstoy and Plato?

One obvious course is to rest the realist case on the conjectures of connoisseurship, the canons that are uncovered in the history of art. These canons are the works of art themselves. It is the object of connoisseurship—the thing the connoisseur looks at—not the subject and relation of evaluation, that Gombrich considers. “Canons and Values” (in E.H. Gombrich, Ideals and Idols, 1979) is a copy of his correspondence with Quentin Bell, an art critic. Bell begins by pointing out that the canon must include the innovators. Whistler, for example, is included because of all his imitators. Yet, and this is the crux of the matter, Bell goes on to say, “it may not always be clear who is painting the best paintings”. (Gombrich. 1979:169) Gombrich’s reply to this is the admission that, even with Michelangelo’s greatness, “I select him for my canon on the grounds … of faith and hope.” (Gombrich. 1979:171) Gombrich even suggests that, in the end, he might be advocating nothing more than “a retrograde step towards an ‘Academic’ interpretation of art”. (Gombrich. 1979:172) This raises the issue of whose views are to be consulted in the formulation of the canon. Bell’s rejoinder is this:

The trouble is that by making the canon acceptable to myself I may have made it unacceptable to you. To the true Canonist the canon is the ark of the covenant; I have turned it into a public convenience, which is not quite the same thing. (Gombrich.1979:180)

Gombrich then admits that every generation revises the canon. This conclusion to the correspondence provides no answer to the relativist. Although there is the suggestion they have avoided, somehow, “a complete relativism” (in Bell’s words) or a “radical relativism” (in Gombrich’s), they are forced to admit, to quote Bell, that “fashions of our day and even, to some extent, those of the past” are perceived “through a distorting glass … which is ever moving in front of our eyes.” (Gombrich.1979:178)

Is the canon, then, one of Thomas Kuhn’s paradigms? Gombrich thinks not; and a second argument follows this path. He prefers to follow Popper and see objective knowledge as based on trail and error, on conjectures and refutations. Just as science is “kept on the boil” by this process—not nobbled by the “normal science” of a paradigm—in the history of art canons can be seen as conjectures:

The canon is our starting point, our guiding theory about that aspect of image-making we call mastery. It may be no more infallible than other theories can ever be … (Gombrich.1979:165)

In accepting a canon as a tentative theory, Gombrich believes he ceases to be the “complete relativist” and “subjectivist” and sides with tradition:

 In fact we may feel that as far as the peaks of art are concerned, it is not so much we who test the masterpiece, but the masterpiece which tests us. (Gombrich. 1979:164)

In Popper’s philosophy of science, objective knowledge requires not only the bold conjectures of a canon, but also the conditions that, if met, would mean the refutation of the canon. It is not simply verifiability, but falsifiability. Unfortunately, Gombrich does not extend his analysis to this crucial step. Undoubtedly the canon is critical, but it remains unclear on what rational grounds it might even be rejected as a “public convenience”!

A third attempt turns to what Popper calls “the logic of the situation”. This Gombrich first outlined in The Poverty of Historicism (1969). In art, Gombrich unpacks it in these terms:

It is always illuminating to explore the situation in which the artist found himself, the options he had, and the decisions he made within the tradition in which he was bound to work. (Gombrich. 1979:148)

In “The Logic of Vanity Fair: Alternatives to Historicism in the Study of Fashions, Styles and Taste” (first published in The Philosophy of Karl Popper, 1974) Gombrich quotes Popper’s description of this “logic” as working though the social context of art, “something like an analysis of social movements”. (Gombrich.1974:926) To illustrate, Gombrich examines how fashions, styles and taste evolve in an artistic milieu. He does this by telling of his experiences in Paris early in the twentieth century. Impressionism was the dominant style. He was upbraided by his friends for suggesting that shadows are grey. Walking though the Latin Quarter, he readily agreed that they were, indeed, purple. Ten years later, he was then told: “Do not paint what you see, paint what you feel.” Subsequently, one member of the group attended a lecture on mineralogy at the Sorbonne. The topic was crystallisation. From this was born the “magic word, destine to become a talisman of modern painting … A new theory of art was being constructed, based on the idea of crystals being primitive forms of all things.” (Gombrich. 1974:936) Here was the evolution of a social movement. It was exemplified in the change in styles from Impressionism to Expressionism to Cubism.

This story of art is a very different one from the psychologism of Kant, a theory of art based on personal, disinterested, judgments. For Gombrich, the expression, “I like it”, rather implies, “I believe that is the kind of thing my group accepts as good. Since I like my group, I like it too.” (Gombrich. 1974:949) Art as “self-expression”, whether interested or disinterested, is “total nonsense”. So too is art conceived “as the expression of the age”. Hegel’s historicism involves the logical progression of the zeitgeist. The philosophy of history unveils a series of discrete ages. Without going into the mechanics of this dialectic, art is one manifestation of this changing spirit. It begins with the architecture of the pyramids, then the sculpture of the Greeks. The paintings in the Christian Age of Faith follow, but then yield, in turn, to the less tangible in poetry. The final synthesis is abstract philosophy. These historicist speculations, unfortunately, throw little light on any particular period or its evolution. The change from Impressionism to Cubism, for example, finds a simpler sociological cause.

Hegel mistakenly thought he had found objectivity though the logic of the dialectic, but what of the “logic of the situation”? Does Gombrich’s sociology of styles provide objectivity? From Gombrich’s perspective, not entirely: “We grade a work of art within a style, but we refrain from pronouncing about the value of different styles.” (Gombrich. 1979:146)  Gombrich calls this “stylistic relativism”, for which he has no realist answer. This is not a species of cultural relativism, however, because styles are sometimes cross-cultural. And he also disputes Peter Winch, and those who contend cultures are incommensurate. In “Understanding a Primitive Society” (American Philosophical Quarterly, 1964) Winch argued that the concept of Zande witchcraft could not be translated into an objective anthropology. Counter to this, Gombrich contends we have made significant advances in translating Egyptian culture, for example, and we can certainly translate and make intelligible different styles from an objective standpoint.

Take the case, again, of the change from Impressionism to Cubism. Cubism was very different from Impressionism. Quoting two eyewitness accounts of the origin of this social movement, Gombrich points out that the two masters—Picasso and Braque—were neither mathematically nor philosophically literate. They painted first, and then, only later, dressed up their explanations. Leo Stein—a comrade and American art collector—put it this way:

There was a friend of the Montmartre crowd, interested in mathematics, who talked about infinities and fourth dimensions. Picasso began to have opinions on what was and what was not real, though as he understood nothing of these matters the opinions were childishly silly. He would stand before a Cezanne or a Renoir picture and say contemptuously, “Is that a nose? No, this is a nose”, and then he would draw a pyramidal diagram. “Is this a glass?”, he would say, drawing a perspective view of a glass. “No, this is a glass”, and he would draw a diagram with two circles connected by crossed lines. I would explain to him that what Plato … meant by “real things” were not diagrams, that diagrams were abstract simplifications … that Platonic ideas were worlds away from abstractions.  (Leo Stein, quoted in E.H.Gombrich. Topics of Our Time. Phaidon. 1991:136)

A second contemporary, an art dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, “recalled that in 1908 Picasso had told him that he wanted an engineer to be able to construct the object depicted in his paintings”. (Gombrich. 1991:136) Maybe, Gombrich further mulls, “the search for alternative methods of representation had led him to books on isometric drawings or similar devices which he wished to incorporate in his paintings”. (Gombrich.1991: 137)

At any rate, Kahnweiler translates the Cubist movement as part of the great representational project in the history of art. It was a language that could be interpreted and critically understood. With Impressionism we can accept, after assimilating the “dabs” and “patches”, a new way of seeing nature. With Cubism, the new “geometrical impressions disappear completely as soon as familiarity with the new methods leads to the correct process of ‘reading’”. (Gombrich. 1991:139) That few have learnt this language, and that most prefer the language of Impressionism, is beside the point. The art historian is not “obliged to endorse every ideology that has ever blossomed into art”. Indeed, “fallacious ideas can result in admirable pictures”. (Gombrich. 1991:141)

The social analysis of styles in Gombrich’s hands is enlightening. It shows that, sociologically speaking, Cubism is no more mysterious than Impressionism; that it was part of the culture of Montmartre and formed a perfectly intelligible language that could be accepted or rejected. Such analysis, however, cannot confirm the aesthetic significance of the movement. His “stylistic relativism” unavoidably prompts him to make a final appeal to Popper. Can his philosophy “restore the independence of art from social pressures and vindicate the objectivity of its values”? (Gombrich 1974:955)

A fourth, and final, way forward is incompletely expounded in Gombrich’s book Art and Illusion. In Popper’s philosophy of science there are no such things as pure observations. Every observation is theory impregnated. Similarly, in art, Gombrich argues, there is no such thing as the “innocent eye”. The painter does not paint what he sees, but sees what he paints. The painter inherits, or adopts, a schema by which he attempts to capture that part of reality that is consistent with the tradition he is working within. Over time the illusions are refined or corrected. For Popper every question implies a tentative theory. For Gombrich:

This description of the way science works is eminently applicable to the story of visual discoveries in art. Our formula of schema and correction, in fact, illustrates this very procedure. (Gombrich. 2012:272)

There are four elements in Popper’s description of the evolution of objective knowledge. The initial problem, the tentative theory, the refinements of this theory—what he calls error elimination—then the new problems that arise from this process. The more interesting and different the new problems, the better the initial theory. These are called “progressive problem shifts” and knowledge is said to evolve by this process. If few or no problems are generated, this is called a “degenerative problem shift” and the theory is discarded. In failing to produce new problems, the research program is abandoned on the grounds that it does not provide a way forward.

In art, we also start with a problem. Indeed, Constable viewed painting as a science, much like the physics of his day. His problem was chiaroscuro. It was not dissimilar to the problem that occupied the Impressionists, like Rembrandt and many others before. Constable was trying to “achieve the impression of light and depth by modulating tone”, (Gombrich. 2012:42) what he called the “evanescent effects of nature’s chiaroscuro”. Part of his schema, or theory, was to change hues and introduce more green than was conventionally fashionable. The Hay Wain, painted in 1821 and exhibited in Paris in 1824, led French artists to “lighten their palettes”.

The social movement of Impressionism, which took its name from Monet’s painting Impression, Sunrise (1872), was inspired by the bright and simplified mass of colours found in the Japanese wood block. A change in the medium was also the invention of the lead paint tube. This portability enabled en plein air painting. New problems arose. The effects of light and haze, dazzle, even glare, could be explored. Monet’s iconic series of twenty-five haystacks (1890) painted over three seasons—summer, autumn and winter—were reworkings and refinements to a schema that explored optical effects. This led to progressive problem shifts. Remaking involved exploring the effects of fractured brushwork, blocks of bright colours, the rendering of blue trees and red grass. This was further reworked by the new problems of the Neo-Impressionists. Experiments with dots (Seurat) and dabs (Pissarro), horizontal brush strokes—“a vortex of lines”, as Gombrich describes it—(Van Gogh), then the cylinders, the sphere and the cone that explored form and structure (Cezanne). Seurat’s new theory attempted to create the illusion of more luminosity by a method called pointillism. His “cromo-luminarist” theory required you to step back to allow the colours to meld.

As Gombrich points out, the “testing” of these new theories was first the shock, then the acceptance and delight of this new language: “The visible world could after all be seen in terms of these bright patches and dabs of paint.” (Gombrich. 2012.275) It even became a case of “nature imitates art”. Gombrich observed, “As Oscar Wilde said, there was no fog in London before Whistler painted it.” (Gombrich. 2012.275) What began as a “school of smudges and spots” became an admired progressive research program.

If Gombrich had developed this Popperian analysis of problem shifts within an artistic tradition, he might have been more clearly in a position to revise his “stylistic relativism”. Styles could be analysed and compared on how progressive or regressive the tradition turned out to be. Refutations would fall under considerations of technique. What reworkings or revisions are made? In science, this is error elimination. In art, it is refinement to the schema. Particular artists could be considered in terms of what questions they are addressing, if they come up with new solutions and then further questions, or if they degenerate into addressing the same old problems and coming up with the same old solutions. No error elimination, no fresh problems. On these grounds, I think Quentin Bell would be on stronger ground in making out his case for the merit of Whistler over his imitators.

Popper: Art and self-expression

Many commentators have extolled Paul Cezanne in the rise of cubism. To Edmund Capon, recently the director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, he is “arguably … the most influential figure of twentieth-century Western art”. (Edmund Capon. I Blame Duchamp. Penguin. 2009:173) Small wonder a Cezanne was his last major acquisition for the gallery. Capon further observes that Cezanne was neither Impressionist nor Post-Impressionist. Their problems of changing light were not his. According to Capon, Cezanne speaks of sensation and feelings, “two complementary instincts informed by mind and by intuition”. (Capon.2009:173) On this reading, there are only some small steps to Tolstoy.

This is not a starting point for a Popperian understanding of art. Karl Popper puts no weight on feelings in his analysis. “The expressionist theory of art is empty,” he says. (Popper. Autobiography, in The Philosophy of Karl Popper. 1974:48) Self-expression, emotion, is trivially true of all human behaviour, and it is not a distinctive characteristic of art. It is obviously true that the artist can be emotionally moved by his work, that he might strive to convey this emotion to his audience. Indeed, the artist might even harness this emotion as a kind of test to the “success or fittingness or the impact of the (objective) work”. (Popper.1974:52) But it is always the work itself, the object, that elicits these emotions, and to confuse affect and object is to fall into the relativistic confusion of Tolstoy. When the subject and relations of emotion are elevated, it is a slippery slope to irreconcilable debate over emotive response and intuition. An investigation into the object—the work of art itself—is exchanged for the stock-in-trade of the subjectivist.

Capon is on surer ground when he explores this object—the composition, structure and harmony—and remarks that Cezanne “dissected, disassembled and then re-assembled his subjects—and in doing so imbued the individual components with extraordinary strength, logic and credence”. (Capon.2009:174)  This is another way of describing Popper’s process of error elimination. An alternative interpretation of the meaning of “sensation” for Cezanne might elaborate this realist point.

At the end of his life, in a series of letters to the young painter and critic Emile Bernard, Cezanne talks of his paintings as “experiments”, as “research in nature” and as a “proof of theories”. Like Constable, his labours appear as science: “I believe in the logical development of what we see and feel through the study of nature, never mind about the techniques” of painting. (Letter to Emile Bernard, 21^st September 1906, in The Letters of Paul Cezanne. Edited and translated by Alex Danchev. 2013:373) Roughly along the lines of the British Empiricists, Cezanne assumes sensations come from nature. They are sense data that comprise our perceptions. The problem for the artist is to capture this nature. This is what he means by the “realisation of nature”: “In order to make progress in realisation, there is only nature, and an eye educated by contact with it.” (Letter to Emile Bernard. 25^th July 1904. Danchev.2013:342) Even in his letter to Louis Aurenche, where emotions are mentioned, it is the “sensation of nature”—where the object enables perception—that is “the necessary basis for all artistic conception”. Certainly he goes on to say “our emotion is no less essential”, but this is not something that is spontaneous, immediate or easy. It “is acquired only though very long experience”. . (Letter to Louis Aurenche. 25^th January 1904. Danchev.2013:332) It is for this reason that, although Cezanne calls “sensations” his stock-in-trade, (Letter to his Son. 15^th October 1906. Danchev.2013:381) this does not lead to Expressionism, but a schema of a different sort.

That Cezanne left many of his works unfinished is well known. The experiment failed; he could not re-assemble these works to the satisfaction of the schema; he could not achieve a “realisation of nature”. To more clearly show his importance, a comparative study of the unfinished with finished works would be instructive. Such analysis might show under what conditions his “mosaic theory of representation” works—where the shapes cohere into a “convincing whole”—and under what conditions the schema fails and they are left unfinished. There is one reference in his letters to this problem. In explaining his theory of perception to Emile Bernard—a member of Gauguin’s Pont-Aven School, and later a Symbolist—he remarks:

the sensations colorantes that create light are the cause of abstractions that do not allow me to cover my canvas, nor to pursue the delimitation of objects when their points of contact are subtle, delicate; the result of which is that my image or painting is incomplete. (Letter to Emile Bernard. 23^rd October 1905. Danchev 2013:355)

Amusingly, and treading on Bernard’s toes, the letter ends with a pointed dismissal of the neo-impressionist’s penchant “that outline (everything) in black, a defect that must be resisted with all one’s might”.

Further exploration on these themes, no doubt, could draw out the distinctiveness of Cezanne’s schema—for example, in his still-life painting, the overcrowding of surfaces, tilting of flat planes, the mixing of perspectives, and how this was assimilated and adapted by Picasso to produce radically different problems around ambiguity. Following Capon, Jeffrey Smart could be seen as a counterpoint to this problem shift. In his work we find a very different notion of ambiguity. Capon has remarked that although his realism comes from the High Renaissance of Piero della Francesca, he also follows Cezanne, where

subject matter is merely the building blocks of composition … Like Cezanne, Smart’s real interest is to put the right shapes in the right colours in the right places. (Capon.2009:  184)

Unlike Picasso’s ambiguity, stemming from form, in Smart’s case

We … find it slightly disturbing and hard to believe that practical and mundane fixtures, like roads and railways, should be elevated to the status of semi-mystical icons. (Capon.2009:185)

Picasso and Smart are two very different developments from Cezanne. A Popperian method of problem shifts could explore why Picasso’s research program turned out the more progressive; why a neo-della Francesca realism is regressive. Or, such an investigation might draw a quite different conclusion. Either way, such an analysis would be a path that leads away from Gombrich’s stylistic relativism.

Anderson: Art and values

Even though the analysis of problem shifts is a promising way forward, Gombrich leaves it only as a suggestion. It was never systematically worked out. He remained troubled with the relationship between facts and values, and how this impinged on objectivity in the arts. Popper’s first formulation of this problem is mentioned in The Open Society and its Enemies. (Vol. 1 Plato. Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1969) Discussing Plato, on nature and convention, a dualism arises with “the impossibility of reducing decisions or norms to facts”. (Popper. 1969:63) G.E. Moore had labelled the confusion of facts with values “the naturalistic fallacy”. Like most English philosophers in the first half of the twentieth century, Popper appears to accept this doctrine. His summation was, “It is impossible to derive a sentence stating a norm or a decision or, say, a proposal for a policy from a sentence stating a fact.” (Popper. 1969:64) The principle rested on the validity of the argument. It is invalid to derive an ought (norm) from an is (fact). “I believe in the impossibility of reducing decisions or demands to facts.” (Popper. 1969:211) There was, however, a qualification, because Popper also goes on to say, “they can, of course, be treated as facts”. (Popper.1969:211) And again, “Our dualistic thesis then becomes … proposals are not reducible to facts (or to statements of facts, or to propositions) even though they pertain to facts.” (Popper.1969:235)

This dualism has always been a problem for aesthetics. The area for study is the norms of beauty. If these norms were not matters of fact, how could they be discussed objectively? Popper’s positive resolution to this impasse was to sidestep the dualism by contending that it is still possible to investigate the problems of aesthetics in the same manner that it is possible to investigate the problems of science. They both follow the same path of problem shifts in the evolution of objective knowledge. As to the dualism itself, he always remained equivocal. Toward the end of his life, in a reply to the pleas from Gombrich, all he could do was to quote Gombrich back to himself. The dualism is addressed only in metaphor. It is the story of a Berlin professor writing against the Nazi purges at the universities. Upon publication of his protest, he spends the night with friends listening to chamber music—the place of value—whilst waiting for the Gestapo knock at the door—the facts. Fortunately, it did not come. And Popper concludes: “I cannot think of a better illustration of the place of value [chamber music] in a world of facts [the knock at the door].” (Popper.1974:1180 ‘Reply to my Critics’ taken from Gombrich’s address ‘Art and Self Transcendence’.)

Facts and values reside in the same world. “Art has a place in this world of facts.” (Popper. 1974:1180) But there remains an implied conceptual, ontological—it is not at all clear—distinction. By following Popper, this distinction precluded Gombrich from developing a theory of aesthetics. He always thought his descriptive accounts ultimately rested on evaluations, or norms, which were not in some way matters of fact.

The realism of John Anderson—Challis Chair of Philosophy, Sydney University, 1927 to 1958—argues against this, and other dualisms. In ethics, this means a purely descriptive study expunged from prescriptions. A theory of ethics is an account of what is the case. Certainly the moral world is full of prescriptions, and other relations, but these are simply described as part of the rich social fabric, and should not be confused with an objective description of ethical qualities, such as sociality, the productive ethic, and other examples Anderson explores in his account of the good. Moral demands, and other abstract relations connected to these qualities, remain the subject matter of sociology. The source of relativism in ethics is the confusion of these relations with the object itself. This is the main reason why a positive science of ethics has not come about. The naturalistic fallacy is avoided in this position because the speech acts involving norms and decisions—prescriptive and proscriptive utterances, for example—do not enter into the account. Ethics is not a study of what “ought” to be, but what “is”.

Anderson’s position in aesthetics is an extension of his arguments against relativism and dualism. It could be taken as the basis for a positivist argument against Tolstoy’s reduction of a work of art—the object—to its social context—the relations of communion. It could also be the basis for an empiricist argument against the dualism of Plato, and also the implicit dualism found in the realism of Popper and Gombrich.

Anderson’s papers on aesthetics are brief. They are collected in Art and Reality (1982). It is through arguments against the positions he is exposing that he works out his own alternative theory. Most of the more detailed analysis deals with literature, where the tenet of his theory of art—the development of theme—is more obviously and clearly applied. This is because literature and music occur over time. Music, for example, relies on the memory of the listener piecing together the elaborations and transformations of theme. Depending on the complexity, much re-listening may be required for familiarity and ultimate enjoyment. Plastic arts, however, primarily occur in space. Although they too must have a theme, the notion of development is more problematic. Anderson has very little to say about painting, and it is not at all clear why “wholeness, harmony, and radiance” might lead him to admire Cezanne, say, over his contemporaries.

The foundation of Anderson’s aesthetics is taken from James Joyce, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. (Penguin. 1968) Here Stephen briefly enumerates “the qualities of universal beauty”:

Aquinas says … integritas, consonantia, claritas. I translate it so: Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony, and radiance …

First … the aesthetic image is … self bounded and self contained … you apprehend it as one thing. You see it as one whole. You apprehend its wholeness. That is integritas …

Second … you apprehend it as balanced part against part … you feel the rhythm of its structure … you feel now that it is a thing … the result of its parts and their sum, harmonious. That is consonantia …

Finally … You see that is that thing which it is and no other thing. The radiance … the whatness of a thing. (Joyce. 1968:211-13)

Anderson says little about wholeness, harmony and radiance. For Anderson’s purposes, a better synonym of integritas might have been integrity, as wholeness suggests an investigation into how the art object is integrated. Anderson has more to say on the second, harmony. In painting this might have related to the balance of the composition. Anderson, however, stresses the structure of the work and this leads to his central concern, the development of theme. A work of art:

must not be simply a collection of bits and pieces. It must be built round some theme forming what I have called the structure of the work. In the case of literature and music this theme is often enunciated quite early in the work by a significant phrase of words or notes; in the plastic arts by a significant shape, or mass by focusing on which we get the structure which has been built up around it. (Anderson. 1982:265)

Of the theme, the artist may be vague or even confused. Like the unconscious mind that manifests itself in dreams, he might not even be aware:

and it is here that the discerning critic can help us, so long as he is free as possible from the vices that beset so many people concerned with the arts e.g., sentimentalism, romanticism, representationism … (Anderson. 1982:266)

 The structure and theme of a work of art is summed up in Joyce’s aesthetics:

The significant phrase in music is repeated with variations in pitch, in volume, in rhythm etc., just as the significant shape in the plastic arts (the square , the oblong etc.,)  is repeated in various ways … yet all working together to form an articulated structure of “wholeness, harmony and radiance” … (Anderson. 1982:267)

Such elaboration is only a very incomplete skeleton of a positive theory of aesthetics. Not much is established in the plastic arts. It would require a Gombrich, an art historian, to add flesh, and many more bones, to Anderson’s argument. In Matthew Arnold’s words, it would require a very much better acquaintance with “the best that has been known and thought in the world”. (Anderson. 1982:268) Such a theory would be based on contingent identity statements on, in Anderson’s words, “what has been considered beautiful throughout the ages, what has stood the test of time”. (Anderson. 1982:268) Without more explication, in the plastic arts Anderson does not get us much beyond David Hume—a connoisseur’s understanding—or Gombrich—notions of the canon.

Conclusion: Progress and regress in art

Inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach, Karl Popper was a writer of fugues. If progressive problem shifts in music did not stop in 1750, they certainly did not extend much beyond the death of Mozart in 1791. So far as music is concerned, Popper’s alarmist response to modernity has a similar tone to that of Plato and Tolstoy. The basis of his critique, however, is not moral outrage. There is no conflation of aesthetics with morality. As a realist, he would also have no truck with Tolstoy’s relativism, and in The Open Society he systematically rejected Plato’s idealism. This position of Popper is based on an erudite understanding and training in music. One of the two oral exams for his PhD was on music history. Arising from his musical experiences in Vienna, and his views on the “poverty of historicism”, Popper came to find the idea of progress in music problematic.

The Hegelian dialectic, and the inevitability of progress, was adopted by Wagner, introduced into music, and presented as a “spirit of the time”. On Wagner’s own estimation, he was ahead of his time, the “unappreciated genius”, and only understood by the connoisseur. Popper disputes Wagner’s expressionist music as progress, just as he was critical of the anti-expressionist movements that opposed it, those of serialism—atonal twelve-note music—and musique concrete—synthesisers and recordings from nature. Although these were reactions against Romanticism, Popper also rejected them for lacking melody, harmony and rhythm.

Popper’s understanding of music, outlined in his autobiography, proceeds as follows. In music, according to Popper, the discovery of polyphony was peculiar to Western civilisation and was just as significant as the other great human achievement, the rise of science. It occurred sometime between the ninth and fifteenth centuries. We cannot be sure, because counterpoint singing and harmony may have been an accident, or mistake, made by a church congregation. It was then introduced as a compatible second melody that could be sung in conjunction with the original. The oddness of Popper’s position is that this progressive problem shift, something that occurred over 500 years ago, is sufficient. Unlike science, “In music such inventions as counterpoint revealed almost an infinity of new possibilities and problems.” Evolution is somehow circumscribed. This is because, in music:

There is always the danger that newly realized possibilities may kill old ones: dynamic effects, dissonance, or even modulation may … dull our sensitivity to the less obvious effects of counterpoint …(Popper.1974:54)

Since J.S. Bach, the problem shifts in music have been regressive:

What I really accuse many of the “modern” musicians of is their failure to love great music—the great masters and their miraculous works, the greatest perhaps that man has produced.

The modern musicians he speaks of were the Schoenberg Society, in Vienna. They began as Wagnerians, then set about to oust Wagner, “as if someone had smeared the score of Tristan while the ink was still wet” in the words of Michael Hall. (Michael Hall. Leaving Home. Faber and Faber. 1969:32) Popper had been intimately acquainted with this modernist movement. However, like Tolstoy, he came to believe that Wagner was “the main villain of the piece”. (Popper.1974:55) Returning to Plato, Popper suggests that the poet or musician is likely to be either a “skilful deceiver” or “genuinely inspired by the gods”. (Popper. 1974:51) Bach was on the side of the gods; Wagner, and those after him, were the skilful deceivers. The explication of expressionism in the modernist movement follows:

If we take the theory of inspiration and frenzy, but discard divinity, we arrive … at the modern theory that art is self-expression, or more precisely, self–inspiration and the expression and communication of emotion. (Popper 1974:51-52)

Anderson is in agreement with Popper at this point. Expressionism, he said, “the interpretation of works in terms of the soul-states of the artist may be regarded as a particular form of romanticism”. (Anderson.1982:56) And romanticism, for Anderson, is a veil for the error of illusions. Like Popper, he condemns this as “extrinsic appreciation”, of trying to “estimate works by something outside the works themselves”. (Anderson.1982:57) Like Popper, he accepts that emotions are present in art, but the objectivist point is that, in Poppers words, “the artist and his audience are emotionally moved by the work of art”. (Popper. 1974:52) It is “the musician struggling to solve musical problems” (Popper 1974:53) that moves us, and it is upon these problems, or themes in the structure of the work, that aesthetic judgments are made.

Although Gombrich shares his friend’s prejudice in music, as a historian of art he would be hard pressed to accept Popper’s errant views on problem shifts. He accepts that his own “conservatism” in music is “dogmatic”. He likes recognisable tunes, and he dislikes “contemporary experiments”. In this sense, Popper and Gombrich’s repugnance of the modern is a return to Plato and Tolstoy. Certainly, the profanity of twentieth-century art is more difficult to navigate than Bach’s sacred fugues, but neither Popper nor Gombrich are really in a position to deny progress. Gombrich admits as much:

I must grant the possibility that, despite the historicist nonsense talked by Schoenberg’s champions, there are fascinations in the serialist game which long efforts and familiarity would reveal. (Gombrich.1974:953)

In the plastic arts, of course, Gombrich is the happy chronicler, neither conservative nor dogmatic. The striking feature here is that in the twentieth century, mimesis has been “rejected as a worthy aim of art”. (Gombrich.2012:xv) The history of art has been an evolution from sacred pictographs to profane photographs. Today the importance of the discovery of photography “can hardly be overrated”. (Gombrich.1991:148) The old illusions of the artist—his niche in society—are now better provided by the entertainment industry, posters, advertising, film, even “virtual reality”.

Plato was always wrong in denying the artist was a maker of things. Even then, architecture and sculpture would have been hard for him to explain. Today, however, and starting in the late Renaissance, says Gombrich:

The claim to be a creator, a maker of things, passed from the painter to the engineer—leaving to the artist only the small consolation of being a maker of dreams. (Gombrich.2012:83)

In the twenty-first century, even if this is the boundary of art, Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, published at the beginning of the twentieth century, is a very large canvas to fill.