CHAPTER 8

BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE 1945–65

Fragmented Possibilities

In prewar Vienna, the study of caricature and borderline art gave Kris an unsteady but still workable identity as an art historian. In postwar New York, his psychoanalytic practice and research now became the foundation of his professional life and provided the opening to a wider public. Having survived the wreck of Austrian art and politics, he fastened more firmly to the rock of psychoanalysis and its Freudian substratum. He co-edited the abridged publication of the Freud–Fliess correspondence, and in the introduction he stressed the physiological and neurological thinking behind Freud’s discoveries.1 He trained psychiatrists at the New York Psychoanalytic Society, became a founding editor of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, led research at the Yale Child Study Center, and collaborated with Heinz Hartmann and Rudolph M. Loewenstein to write “a system of psychoanalysis”—the long-delayed realization of his goal to advance a psychoanalytic psychology.² In all of these efforts, he attempted to reawaken an interest in Freud as scientist.

Immediately after the war, Kris participated in the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, a branch of the American Psychological Association. Reminiscent of Lynd’s Knowledge for What?, the society defined its purpose as “the directing of psychological research toward contemporary problems, making available to citizens outside the psychological profession conclusions drawn from the scientific study of human behavior.”3 Kris contributed to its 1945 publication Human Nature and Enduring Peace, in which psychologists, sociologists, and foreign policy analysts debated issues of postwar recovery. The society’s working groups regarded the spirit of wartime alliances as the foundation of postwar internationalism, as the volume stated: “[T]he only apparent cause of war involving the three advanced systems [the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union] would be the most idiotic defensive anxiety and a mounting spiral of armaments, mutual suspicion, and fear.”⁴

In the book, the social psychologist Gordon W. Allport described the psychological advantages that derived from an international organization of states. The psychologist of art Rudolf Arnheim analyzed German reconstruction and war crimes trials and called on the tribunals to confront fascism as a global phenomenon, not only as an outcome of German nationalism. Participating in discussions on reconstruction in Japan was Owen Lattimore. A Sinologist on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University and a member of the Institute of Pacific Relations, Lattimore five years later became the first target of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s attacks on East Asian policymakers.⁵

In a working group on “public opinion and world order,” Kris discussed how professionals in the field of mass communication could most effectively promote internationalism. He warned against adopting the methods of mass advertisers and marketeers. Instead, he advised that opinion pollsters join with communication scholars to undertake scientific studies of how different nations had experienced the impact of war. Such research would provide a foundation for greater mutual understanding: “Interdependence becomes more clearly focused, interests more sharply crystallized; and the information on existing opinion is likely to engender demand for information as to the reasons underlying it.”⁶ In this international effort, world organizations had to produce their own structure of global information and communication. Kris found inspiration for his proposals in Civilization and Its Discontents, perhaps Freud’s most fatalistic writing, where according to Kris, Freud conveyed that “in spite of determining biological factors changes occur over long periods of time which affect even basic human reactions. These changes may then be evaluated as progress.”7

After the war, Kris did not seek a position in art history or museum work, and although he worked with Hartmann and Loewenstein on the reformulation of Freudian theory, he never returned to his plan for a comprehensive psychology of art. He fluctuated between accepting the permanently divided nature of his scientific and humanist interests and following his former impulse toward integrating them. In October 1945, he wrote to Gombrich that they could resume their prewar collaboration “if and when I should apply to the Rockefeller Foundation for the grant for studies in the social psychology of art.”⁸ Three months later he explained in a resigned and clinical tone, “I have moved away so far from the humanities per se that they evoke mainly nostalgic memories.”⁹ His prewar projects sank into the past or vanished into an uncertain future. Where his scholarly agenda was concerned, Kris wrote, “I have ceased to believe in long term planning.”¹⁰

Years of forced exile and war reinforced the sense of disruption he had first experienced in Vienna. Kris never acquired a stable institutional and intellectual foothold but instead built and rebuilt his work on shifting professional and historical foundations. A great part of his achievement consisted in his ceaseless efforts to respond to those shifts, to heal the fractures they caused in his career and projects, and to draw together the persistently changing perspectives that rose before him. Committed to defending and expanding Freud’s original insights, he remained open to new integrative visions but continued to suspect self-contained, unified systems. Yet, as the inward counterpart to this experimentalism, he developed an ever deeper sense of uncertainty and loss and an abiding concern with the problem of personal and collective remembrance. Although his work with Hartmann and Loewenstein placed new psychoanalytic emphasis on the ego’s cognitive functions, he hoped eventually to focus his chief attention on a science of memory. The opportunity never appeared.11

Before the end of 1945, Gombrich resumed his fellowship at the Warburg Institute, which had become a part of the University of London a year earlier but which still could offer him no permanent academic post.¹² He had expected the monitoring service to be incorporated into the new Labour government’s intelligence bureaus and thought momentarily about remaining at the listening post. Kris had urged him to support the Labour ministry:

My own impulse would be to say that any sort of intelligence in the inter-war [sic] period would be both interesting and rewarding, that to serve a government of which one can approve as fully as one can of the present British government is in itself a good thing.¹³

Gombrich, however, had one overriding inclination: to return to the Warburg Institute. Two years later, Ernst Buschbeck, a former Austrian émigré in London and the recently restored director of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, attempted to convince him to return to Austria. On a trip to Paris to organize an exhibition of Austrian art, Buschbeck encountered him and, as Gombrich wrote to Kris, he “tried to persuade me to go to Vienna as a. o. Professor.”¹⁴ Gombrich turned down the offer.

In Gombrich, the division between his scientific and humanist impulses, between his wartime activism and postwar pessimism became increasingly sharp bifurcations. Contact with Karl Popper after the war brought the split to the surface. In March 1946, Gombrich wrote to Kris that Popper had received an appointment to the London School of Economics and that both volumes of The Open Society and Its Enemies now had appeared in Britain: “Of course he distrusts all history, psychology and so on but this rather stimulates than daunts me.”¹⁵ Gombrich looked forward to developing a psychology of art grounded not in a philosophy of history but in a science of perception and he outlined for Kris the theory that remained one of his core insights: “My idea is, of course, that perception never comes first but is conceived in terms of conceptual constructed schemata.”16

Surveying European affairs, a politically resigned Gombrich sided with Winston Churchill, who earlier that month had given his Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri: “There is only ‘the world’ left—but Churchill has said all I could have said, and slightly better, I presume. I do not think that atom bombs are good for the progress of Ghirlandajo research but then …”¹⁷

On the eve of the war, a physicist friend had informed Gombrich of Niels Bohr’s theoretical speculations about a so-called uranium bomb: the acquaintance and Gombrich “were both united in hoping that such a weapon might only be dropped on some desert island, to show friend and foe alike that all other ideas of weaponry and warfare had had their day.”¹⁸ Bohr himself shared that view, as did several Manhattan Project scientists who wrote the Franck Report petitioning to limit the use of the weapon to a test demonstration. But when the nuclear age became a reality, Gombrich—as reflected in his letter to Kris—rejected the possibility of disarmament. He accepted nuclear weaponry as a tool of Cold War deterrence, adopting a position similar to what Jonathan Schell characterized as nuclear Wilsonianism: “To the nuclear realist’s hope for security and the nuclear romantic’s longing for greatness, we must add the nuclear Wilsonian’s dream of peace based on nuclear terror.”¹⁹ In fact, in his final thoughts on the nuclear threat, Gombrich continued to believe that

despite the brutal conflicts and worrying crises that have broken out since 1945 in various parts of the globe, we have been spared a third world war because we all know only too well that it could mean the end of the history of the world. It isn’t a great comfort, but it’s better than none at all.²⁰

At the Warburg Institute, Gombrich rejoined Saxl’s prewar project to assemble Warburg’s biography and collected writings. But collaboration revived disagreements over how to evaluate Warburg’s contributions to art history and how to make his writings accessible to an English-speaking audience. Nor had Saxl’s reticence to publish the caricature book been forgotten.21 Gombrich, however, remained profoundly conscious of both his professional and personal debt to Saxl. He described for Kris his thoughts on returning to the institute:

I did find, however, that my six years absence had given me some wholesome distance to the things (while not causing me to forget them[)] and I did find, furthermore, that these years of practical work have made me a bit more ruthless and “expeditif”. In short I now think that I’ll be able to tackle it and to meet the moral obligation, which, after all, I have in this matter—for without your idea of recommending me to Saxl for the Nachlass I would probably have landed in Auschwitz or somewhere.²²

In a letter to Kris a year earlier, Gombrich had described what most impressed him about Saxl, the scholar who had organized the Goya exhibition in Vienna and who opened the doors of the Warburg Institute as a refuge to exiles: “at bottom he has a strange anarchic form of true humanity and decency which one can’t help liking.”²³ In March 1948, Gombrich wrote Kris informing him of Saxl’s sudden death at the age of fifty-eight. Gombrich and others experienced a sense of disbelief and disorientation at the thought of working without his presence: “There is nothing left, nobody knows what is going to happen and who his successor might be.”²⁴ He once more recalled Saxl’s humane spirit: “His lack of pomposity and his real humanity were irresistible.”²⁵ After Saxl’s death, the prewar caricature project became Gombrich’s most direct scholarly link to the Viennese past.

The Manuscript Revisited

In May 1947, Kris informed Gombrich that the “largest U.S. publishing house seems to be very interested in publishing the large (original) book on caricatures.”26 Kris had kept in contact with John Marshall, and in April 1948, he wrote to Gombrich that Marshall would support a Rockefeller grant for him to come to the United States, during which time they could discuss the caricature manuscript: “I rather feel that we should be able to find some way of presentation which might interest the publisher and ourselves.”²⁷ For Kris, a return to caricature would provide a new opportunity to explore the social psychology of art; for Gombrich, it meant the chance to develop further his psychology of perception and representation.²⁸

Gombrich foresaw significant changes to the prewar book, in part because his own attitude to the manuscript had altered:

I am still convinced that the basic thesis (Ablösung von Magie) [decline of magic] is sound and that there is much else in the book worth saying. I don’t think on the other hand that the book is very well organised and despite the fact that it embraces so much I am not sure that it tells the whole story. I should rather like to link it with another aspect which we would have to discuss and which comes into my “language of the image” hobby.²⁹

Kris and Gombrich decided to update the caricature book in two directions. First, they planned to expand the use of social psychology, tracing links from caricature to magic, propaganda, and social aggression. Second, they looked to tie caricature to conceptual constructs in image making. These ambitions meant rewriting the manuscript nearly from scratch.

Before leaving London, Gombrich formulated two outlines for the new book. He sent the first outline—for a work titled “Psychology and Origins of Caricature”—to Kris in August 1948.³⁰ This blueprint reduced the book from five to four chapters. The first chapter would discuss caricature as both an instrument of imaginary aggression and a technique of visual communication. The second would explain the conditions necessary for the emergence and acceptance of a new, simplified visual language, while the third would follow the development of that language from the artist’s sketch to Töpffer’s reductionist approach. The last chapter would consider the nature and dissolution of image magic. The prewar manuscript’s historical treatment of comic art would be much reduced or deleted altogether. Several months later, Gombrich suggested that the sociological component of the blueprint focus on transformations in perception:

As far as Caricature is concerned I now feel we may have to stress the institutional, social aspect a little more. One can (and does) “learn” to see caricatures. First in small circles (17th century) then in larger ones. I believe altogether that this problem of learning to understand the artist[’]s signs and therewith the interaction between artist and coherent public plays a greater part in the history of art than has been conceded to it.31

In July 1949, Gombrich produced a second, more detailed five-chapter outline—with estimated word counts—for a book that restored the title “Caricature” and that reintroduced a portion of the earlier historical perspective. The first chapter would explore differences between caricature—an art form with its own history—and comic art, propaganda, and aggressive image making, which “have no ‘history’ but exist wherever social conditions permit.”³² The second chapter would focus on the new way of seeing that accompanied caricature, and the third on the dissolution of image magic and the emergence of play with form. The fourth chapter would consider “the persistency of ‘primitive’ traits”³³ in image making, while a concluding chapter would compare caricature to modernist tendencies in art: “Caricature as a model. The primitive survives disguised as ‘art’ but confined to comic. When all barriers fall (modern art) new problems arise.”³⁴ Caricature now interested Gombrich less as an example of political art than as an experiment in technique.

By September 1949, when Gombrich arrived in the United States, he and Kris possessed four different drafts or outlines of the caricature book: the prewar manuscript; the abbreviated wartime manuscript perhaps intended for the Warburg Institute’s journal; the outline incorporating the new emphasis on a psychology of perception; and the outline giving greater prominence to social psychology. During the next four months, the two scholars attempted to salvage a project that now threatened to break apart. They received encouragement from Siegfried Kracauer, who had taken up research into photography and saw in the caricature project a connection to his own study of visual expression. In October, he wrote to Kris:

I also learned, that you are engaged in research on caricature, which, I guess, will continue your previous studies in the field. The theme is of interest to me. I am now preparing … a book on film aesthetics which begins with an analysis of instantaneous photography and for the rest may involve problems overlapping with yours. Should you feel like it, we might, sometime, come together and discuss this matter.35

In January 1950, Gombrich described their progress in a report to Saxl’s successor at the Warburg Institute, Henri Frankfort:

Picking up the threads of our researches before the war, we found ourselves in complete agreement as to which parts could be allowed to stand and which needed revision or re-formulation. I made a first draft of the most crucial chapters and we laid down the argument of the remaining ones in some detail. I think that the book is now “on the rails” for we have a clear idea of its scope, size and approach. We want to call it “The Rise of Caricature, An Essay in the Social Psychology of Art”.³⁶

The ambitiousness of the title, however, betrayed the difficulty of completing the revision. Thirty-five pages in length, the manuscript produced after the war remained a partial product. It included only three brief chapters. The introductory chapter spelled out the extensive aims that Kris and Gombrich still kept in mind for the book:

To observe the invention of an art form and its development from a studio joke to a social institution, even a social power, should in itself be of considerable interest for it is not often in history that we can speak of real beginnings and watch a growth of this kind.37

Caricature portraiture revealed both the psychological components and the social factors that drove artistic experiments:

We believe that the art of caricature is symptomatic of a degree of freedom on the part of the artist, a freedom both in the social and aesthetic sense, to which the figurative arts attained latest of all media of human expression. It is this thesis about the basically “archaic” character of the figurative arts which is to be tested and made explicit through the material of this book. We hope that it may justify the subtitle of this essay. For though caricature itself remains a genre on the fringe of art—caricatures of permanent value are rather rare—a study of its history and its working may help us to lay bare certain mechanisms of artistic creation which remain submerged in the subtler and richer textures of great art.³⁸

A social psychology of caricature would thus reveal the gradual emergence of modern artistic freedom.

The second chapter, following roughly the outline that Gombrich wrote in the previous year, explored comic images from the ancient world to the twentieth century. But it sharply dissociated the evolution of caricature from the rise of political art and excluded the history of the broadsheet altogether. Analysis of political art and propaganda now belonged specifically to social scientists and opinion researchers:

The output of political pamphlets and illustrated broadsides may serve as an indication of what issues stirred the masses and—more interesting still, what political forces were out deliberately to enlist the support of the masses … It is a history which affords much interest to the historian of public opinion and its manipulation—but its relevance to the history of caricature is only evident at one point—the point when caricature in our sense, portrait caricature is first used systematically as one of the methods of pictorial propaganda—and this point is not reached before the middle of the eighteenth century.39

Only the relation of caricature to effigies remained of historical interest: “To the social psychologist they [effigies] serve to show how deeply rooted and universal is the belief in the identity between image and imaged—the root of all image magic.”⁴⁰ Modern caricature emerged when Swiftian self-observation and intellectual awareness allowed the beholder to enjoy, rather than fear, critical images:

They [effigies] show us how jealously the individual guards his likeness … Perhaps we have here one of the reasons why mock portraiture as a harmless joke could only see the light when the fear of the artist’s power over the image had receded and when a few enlightened individuals had learn[ed] to laugh about that self love which guards the [one’s] own likeness as a part of the self.⁴¹

Not Daumier’s republican art but Swift and Hogarth’s moral and psychological studies represented the culmination of caricature.

In the third and last chapter—of which two closely similar versions survive—Kris and Gombrich explored the role of mental projection in portrait art. Like all portrait artists, caricaturists relied on the beholder’s share, on viewers projecting their own visions onto the subject of the image. Reductionist techniques encouraged that process: “the sketch has so much greater chance of being accepted as a good likeness than the elaborate portrait.”⁴² By generating projections, sketch-like portraits endowed their subjects with new life and drew the viewer further into the process of seeing. Caricature, which simplified the face to its “primary relationships,”43 and remained in that way constantly open to the beholder, gave both artist and audience the continuous freedom to experiment.

The rough chapters that emerged from Gombrich’s trip to the United States became the last draft that he and Kris produced for the caricature book. Those brief chapters examined the regressive power of visual images, explored the psychological ground for the rise of a new art, and analyzed projective mechanisms of visual perception. But these divergent approaches soon became irreconcilable. Before the war, the evolution of a republican art served as one of the book’s crucial integrative themes. Without it, the artistic, psychological, and political components that the prewar manuscript brought together began in the early 1950s to split apart.⁴⁴

Caricature and Conceptual Vision

In London, Herbert Read provided a final, indirect impetus to completing the caricature project. Having previously acted as a distant mediator between Kris and the London art public, he now served Gombrich as a guide to reaching English-speaking audiences. During the war, when Marshall asked for his advice on whom to contact in the humanities, Gombrich had recommended Read:

He [Marshall] mentioned that he had seen the head of a historical Institute here who had new ideas which might be worth supporting but in general he expressed some doubt as to new ideas in this country. He wondered whom he should go and see (in this search for ideas), here I was rather high and dry, I suggested Herbert Read, he asked whether he is “in need of support[.]” I said I did not think he was but he was an excellent sound board for new ideas, and a very nice man.⁴⁵

In April 1947, Gombrich wrote to Kris about his idea for “a book, not exactly popular but readable, say, for the public of Herbert Read’s Art and Society.”46 Gombrich apparently kept Read and his audience in mind when finishing The Story of Art, which appeared in print in January 1950 and which drew attention to the linkage between caricature and Expressionism. Like Kris’s Daumier exhibition and Read’s Art and Society, Gombrich’s Story of Art emphasized the challenge that caricature and Expressionism posed to the viewer and art critic:

Caricature had always been “expressionist”, for the caricaturist plays with the likeness of his victim, and distorts it to express just what he feels about his fellow man. As long as these distortions of nature sailed under the flag of humour nobody seemed to find them difficult to understand … But the idea of a serious caricature, of an art which deliberately changed the appearance of things not to express a sense of superiority, but maybe love, or admiration, or fear, proved indeed a stumbling block as Van Gogh had predicted.⁴⁷

Immediately after completing The Story of Art, Gombrich entered more deeply into the problems of pictorial representation, image recognition, and the psychology of perception—problems that Read had connected to caricature in his review of the King Penguin book. In a letter to Kris in April 1950, Gombrich now discussed taking the caricature project even further into those areas:

What I would like most would be some theory of selective perception which seems to me important for physiognomic perception. Obviously we register and remember in a physiognomy first those features which contradict our expectations … I should like to know how far the expected type, the thing that is not registered, can be equated with the conceptual image of a face. A caricature, after all, is more or less a conceptual image of a face, a “skeleton face” or stereotype face on which the physiongomically [sic] relevant deviation has been entered or superimposed whyle [sic] the rest has remained conceptual.⁴⁸

In the following month, upon receiving his appointment to the Slade Professorship in the Fine Arts, Gombrich began to prepare a program of lectures for Oxford. He wrote to Kris in June, “Caricatura makes no progress.”49 In August, the war scare in Korea led Popper to caution Gombrich against making a planned trip to the European Continent because of what Popper perceived as a looming “war danger.”⁵⁰ Although Gombrich ignored the warning, it revived his sense of fatalism: “What a world, and how unnecessary and futile it all looks, does it not?”⁵¹

In April 1951, Gombrich complained to Kris that he had been finding it difficult to write, and attributed the problem to his lecture schedule. But a stimulus to move forward had come from Read:

Luckily my self[-]respect was somewhat restored when I allowed myself to be bullied into contributing an essay for a symposium called “Aspects of Growth and Form” published by a rather cranky but decent philosopher of science for the Institute of Contemporary Art[s] under Herbert Read’s Aegis.⁵²

Soon after the war Read had led the effort to create the ICA, which had officially opened in June 1947.⁵³ Gombrich’s wartime recommendation to Marshall on Read’s behalf had perhaps assisted the art institute’s founding: in 1948, Read reported to the ICA’s organizing committee that “John D. Rockefeller had given him an unsolicited gift of $2,500 for the Institute.”⁵⁴

At the ICA symposium Gombrich presented his seminal essay on the psychology of art and perception, “Meditations on a Hobby Horse.” In a letter to Kris, he explained that he intended the title to echo Swift’s “meditations on a broomstick.”⁵⁵ The ICA talk did, in fact, revisit the fundamental question raised by Swift: To what extent could human beings relinquish their idealized visions of themselves? The answer for Gombrich lay in the psychology of conceptual images and the extent to which people could see themselves within the framework of those images: “At the most primitive level, then, the conceptual image might be identified with what we have called the minimum image—that minimum, that is, which will make it fit into a psychological lock.”56

Just as Kris had argued that image magic did not depend upon exact likeness between image and object, so Gombrich stressed that the conceptual image did not amount to a visual copy. Rather, it offered markers that guided the audience’s own recognitions and triggered their projections. Assisted in this way by the artist, the audience completed the construction of the full image. Gombrich explained to Kris the purpose behind the presentation:

You understand that my aim is to learn a little more about that indispensable notion “the conceptual image” which seems to me somehow quite wrongly conceived. I am more than ever convinced that the problem of the complete or incomplete image in art is one of the key problems.⁵⁷

The appearance at the ICA seminar now generated a new urge to finish the caricature manuscript:

It may be pure “Ausred” [evasion] but I have the feeling at present that a little more analysis of the Abbild [likeness] problem will also do the caricature a good deal of good. Everything has obviously an aura of equivalent images[,] both positive and negative ones.⁵⁸

Read, who had been the first audience in Britain for the caricature project, now provided the last inspiration to completing it.

The correspondence between Kris and Gombrich makes no mention of their final decision regarding the caricature project. It is probable that the decision emerged during Gombrich’s trip to Harvard in July and August 1951, during which time he visited Kris.⁵⁹ In October, Kris worked at revising the essay on caricature that he had presented to the Warburg Institute, which he and Gombrich had published in the British Journal of Medical Psychology and which Kris now incorporated into Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art, published in 1952. Gombrich approved its inclusion and searched out illustrations to go with it.60

Focusing on the fate of image magic and the influence of reductionism, Kris removed from the newly revised essay one of the few allusions to political art. To be sure, examples of Low’s use of reduction in depicting politicians remained—to which were now added examples from Hogarth’s depictions of Whig political leaders. And the reference to Philipon and Daumier’s pear appeared—but now without mention of its significance in the struggle for republican freedom or the accompanying reference to Low’s political animals. Instead, a more dismal judgment of political caricature followed: “As the pear became the mocking symbol in countless caricatures and cartoons, we witness once more the reduction of the portrait caricature to the stereotype for political imagery.”⁶¹ Kris and Gombrich no longer drew attention to caricature as a republican art form but instead stressed its nature as a corrupted, propagandistic medium.

Less than two years later, in April 1954, Gombrich received the invitation to deliver the 1956 A. W. Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.⁶² He included in his talks what he called “the experiment with caricature,” linking it in detail to his investigation of conceptual images in art. In 1960, he published the lectures as Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. The three-ringed notebook with the two hundred and fifty-four-page prewar caricature manuscript still remained filed away with his private papers.

Just as Kris had done in his paper in prewar Lucerne, Gombrich in his lectures in postwar Washington approached caricature as an artistic innovation with implications for both art history and psychological science. His understanding of the experiment, however, now departed from what he and Kris put forward in the prewar manuscript. Caricature emerged as the product of changes in cognition and perception. The rise of a new way of seeing, not the decline of magic and the diminishing of unconscious fear, explained its advent. Hogarth, not Daumier, appeared as the inspirational model—for both the caricaturist and Gombrich. As Hogarth intuited and Gombrich detailed, caricaturists configured their portraits from the minimum of visual clues necessary for facial recognition. The nearer one approached a conceptual image or schema, the closer one came to unmasking the personality. Here Gombrich preserved the core insight from the prewar caricature book: the conceptual image—the minimal or irreducible schema—hid within, not behind, the subject’s facial mask, and the beholder possessed the capacity to switch perception between the schema and mask.

Gombrich again raised the historical question that had guided his work with Kris: Why had the reductionist approach to visual representation emerged only very late in the development of art? He recalled their prewar response:

But may it not be that its very power held it in check? … To the humble craftsman of earlier periods, the experience may not have been free from half-conscious or unconscious fears … These speculations were particularly suggested to me by researches into the history of caricature which I was privileged to undertake with my friend Ernst Kris. Our starting point at the time was the question of why portrait caricature, the playful distortion of a victim’s face, makes only so late an appearance in Western art … We thought at the time that it was the fear of image magic, the reluctance to do as a joke what the unconscious means very much in earnest, which delayed the coming of that visual game.63

Gombrich now argued that the late emergence of caricature derived from the nature of conceptual images: “I still believe these [unconscious] motives may have played their part, but the theory might be generalized. The invention of portrait caricature presupposes the theoretical discovery of the difference between likeness and equivalence.”⁶⁴ The caricaturist produced not portraits from nature but equivalent identities, which “do not depend on the imitation of individual features so much as on configurations of clues.”65 The ability to create and recognize such identities broadened the range of image making. Caricature thus revealed that artistic experimentation moved forward as the constant creation of new perceptual equivalences between images and reality, or in the language of the prewar manuscript, as the ceaseless discovery of new switches between schema and mask.

Hogarth, the master of stage art, had given impetus and direction to such conceptual experiments and reinventions. Envisioning the world as a theatrical tragicomedy, he created from his store of facial schemas the character types and expressive figures that brought his theater to life: “Hogarth accepted the idea of art as a language and seized eagerly on the possibilities it offered for the creation of characters with which to people his imaginary stage.”⁶⁶

Daumier’s significance consisted in expanding the English schemas. Gombrich now downplayed the importance of Daumier’s powers of direct observation and instead emphasized his capacity for mental projection. When beginning an artwork, Daumier preferred to sketch formless “clouds of lines,”⁶⁷ which revealed almost on their own the contours of an image. He remained a vital nineteenth-century experimentalist not by joining the language of art to politics but by pioneering the techniques of Expressionism: “For in and with Daumier the tradition of physiognomic experiment began to be emancipated from that of humor.”⁶⁸ He became a forerunner of the modernist movements that finally “swept away those restraints and taboos that restricted the artist’s choice of means and the freedom of experimentation.”⁶⁹ In Gombrich’s Art and Illusion, Daumier confirmed the crucial creative significance of mental constructs—not of political visions.

If Art and Illusion set out Gombrich’s new direction as both a cultural historian and a psychologist of art, it served also as a remembrance of his beginnings. He dedicated it to the three teachers who influenced his early development. Two of them—Julius von Schlosser and Emanuel Loewy—had died in 1938, the year of the Anschluss. The third teacher, Ernst Kris—who helped guide Gombrich’s career from their original meeting at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna to his presentation of the Mellon Lectures in Washington—had passed away in February 1957.

Political Dissent and Experimental Conditions

When he later recalled the caricature manuscript, Gombrich explained that the Anschluss and the Second World War had brought the project to an end. He did not discuss his and Kris’s four-year effort to revive the caricature book after the war.70 Yet, his explanation remains historically accurate. In the first place, as Freeman Dyson has pointed out, research across disciplinary boundaries became more difficult after the war, both between science and the humanities and within the sciences themselves. Dyson cited the decline in physics of the “mutual admiration and easy mixing of theory and experiment, which seemed natural and necessary in the 1930s” and which had characterized the attitudes of Ernest Rutherford and Albert Einstein.⁷¹ A key reason behind this change, he explained, derived from the growing specialization of theory and experimentation in the 1950s. Increasingly advanced, intricate, and expensive methods and technologies worked against communication across fields. Such specialization of knowledge extended into the humanities, leaving the integrative example of one such as Warburg ever more distant, isolated, and even inconsequential.

The post-1945 social sciences offered a similar picture. Immediately after the war, the émigré sociologist Leo Lowenthal, for example, had used integrated content analysis to dissect the speeches and writings of American right-wing agitators.⁷² But in the years that followed, the discipline of applied psychology departed from the integration of scientific, humanist, and political questions such as those posed by Lowenthal—or by the caricature project. It is indicative that during the 1950s the field of classical studies produced perhaps the most outstanding exceptions to this rule. Works such as those by M. I. Finley and Bernard Knox combined literary, historical, and social analyses not only to reinterpret the ancient past but also to highlight the relevance of ancient studies to the effort at reconstructing postwar political culture.73

Before the war, the caricature project had gained inspiration from new movements in the art world, but by the 1950s, the visual arts had once more changed direction. Expressionism broke its remaining ties to classical representation and embraced more fully the principles of abstraction. Daumier’s political art—now viewed in isolation from his technical mastery—seemed to belong to a fading, irrelevant era.⁷⁴ Even Read no longer believed that the creator of Ratapoil deserved a necessary or important place in the history of contemporary sculpture. In sharp contrast to the discussion of caricature and Expressionism in Art and Society, Read’s 1964 book on the history of modern sculpture alluded to “the odd intrusion of Honoré Daumier, who as early as 1830 was producing busts as superficially ‘modern’ as any works of Rodin.”⁷⁵ Read continued:

But Daumier was a caricaturist, and the kind of deformations made by the caricaturist to secure his satirical emphasis have nothing in common with the formal conceptions of a Rodin (as the satires of Goya, for example, have only a superficial resemblance to Picasso’s drawings for his Guernica) … Any resemblance with the stylistic forms of modern art is therefore “purely coincidental.”⁷⁶

In an age committed to non-representational forms, Daumier—who remained devoted to the classical framework in spite, or perhaps because, of his commitment to innovation—had lost his status even as an experimentalist.

Finally, after 1945, the intellectual culture of the Cold War replaced that of antifascism. In its willingness to cross intellectual and geographic boundaries and in its early grounding in a broad antifascist culture, Kris and Gombrich’s integrative approach reflected a consciousness rooted in the 1930s, a consciousness that in Europe and the United States had helped sustain their interest in Daumier and political art. That motivating spirit faded when the Popular Front culture, which had been one of their sources of inspiration, fell victim to the Cold War.77

In the case of Gombrich, a new kind of pessimism took hold. He chose—almost from desperation—to concentrate his scholarship increasingly on matters of purely visual perception and artistic technique. That fatalism influenced both his conception of Warburg and his understanding of caricature. Having committed himself to the Warburg biography at the height of the interwar crisis, Gombrich wrote and published it long after the war. It now reflected his critique of an art history that linked the transformation of images to progressive, spiritual enlightenment. For a similar reason, his views on the history of caricature changed markedly from the prewar to the postwar eras. Explaining his shift in interpretation, he stated:

[F]or Kris, caricature replaced image-magic … Kris, like Freud, and like Aby Warburg, was completely under the spell of an evolutionist interpretation of human history, imagined as a slow advance from primitive irrationality to the triumph of reason … But I considered it [caricature] as a technical innovation rather than as a symptom of a change in human consciousness. No one can deny that we have made enormous technical advances, but it is also true that in other ways we are still savages.⁷⁸

Caricature art represented a series of methodological advances, but not cultural or political progress. Felix Gilbert had detected this withdrawal of political interest in Gombrich’s exegetical approach to the Warburg biography, in his emphasis on the philosophic and academic rather than the civic and political contexts of Warburg’s life and career:

The bulk of the work [of the biography] consists in presenting and explaining Warburg’s notes. Information about the external circumstances of Warburg’s life within which his ideas developed seems a later addition rather than a fundamental basis of the work.79

In matters of politics and ideas, Gombrich identified perhaps most closely with the outstanding exemplar of the German Enlightenment, the writer G. E. Lessing. Warburg and Freud had seen in Lessing the exemplar of religious toleration and intellectual freedom. For Gombrich, however, he foreshadowed the figure of a conflicted, twentieth-century intellectual. In an essay from the same year as the Mellon Lectures, he wrote:

Lessing, of course, belongs with all his fibres to the great eighteenth century. But just because he was so thoroughly of his time, his dedicated life refutes those insidious voices who like to tell the writer today that the only way out of the Ivory Tower leads through what they call “commitment” to a creed, party, or faction. Lessing was always engaged, but never committed.⁸⁰

Scholarly dedication and personal remembrance attached Gombrich to the Warburg biography and caricature study, but both projects eventually reflected the fatalism that once again overtook him in the postwar years.

In this context, it is interesting to see that Gombrich, two decades after the war, returned to the prewar caricature manuscript. The book had already crossed two historical and political divides: the caesura in Austria and Germany between the republican and Nazi eras and the chasm that opened in Europe and the United States between the antifascist struggle and the Cold War. Now in the mid-1960s, with the emergence of the New Left and the rise of opposition to the Vietnam War, Gombrich looked again at the prewar draft, and began to revise and retype it. He worked once more on a translation of the foreword, marking the date in red pen: “1965.”⁸¹ He added references to the most recent editions of Baudelaire’s commentaries and Töpffer’s theoretical writings. The process of revision, however, went beyond updating prewar translations and citations. Gombrich added a footnote that included a critique of contemporary politics and the media packaging of candidates:

We have now paradoxically returned, via Madison Avenue, to the equation of man with his “image”, a term now widely extended for the opinion or impression a public figure “projects” wittingly or unwittingly to the outside world. In the cynical parlance of commercial and political advertising, if a product or a man fails, he has given out a “false image”; a political attack is conducted by projecting “counter-images”.82

And as an example of the technique of producing new configurations out of familiar words and imagery, he cited the title of a review of Gerald Scarfe’s satiric images—“Scarfaces”—from a June 1966 issue of the New Statesman.⁸³

Gombrich clearly envisioned—at least for a time—trying to publish the twice-abandoned book project, and the date 1966 emphasizes that he contemplated this possibility not as a brief impulse but at least for a year. During that period, he incorporated into the manuscript a new example of the power of image magic—the power that, according to the 1936 Vienna exhibition, Daumier channeled into modern political criticism.

Gombrich cited at length a passage from Norman Mailer’s famous antiwar speech delivered at Berkeley in 1965. The speech concluded with Mailer calling on American war protesters to send pictures of Lyndon Johnson, upside down, throughout the world:

Silently, without a word, the photograph of you, Lyndon Johnson, will start appearing everywhere, upside down. Your head will speak out—even to the peasant in Asia—it will say that not all Americans are unaware of your monstrous vanity, overwee[n]ing pride, and doubtful motive … And those little pictures will tell the world what we think of you and your war in Viet Nam. Everywhere, upside down. Everywhere, everywhere.84

Gombrich read Mailer’s speech in the June 1965 issue of The Realist, where antiwar protesters, through the revived medium of the broadsheet, combined new artistic experimentation with radical political criticism. As in the golden age of caricature, cultural politics in the 1960s relied on unmasking—the response to government authorities who, as Gombrich pointed out, hired professional media agents to mold their public images and who deployed the powers of mass communication to spread their political messages. Through an unimagined circumstance, the New Left now gave revived meaning to the prewar caricature manuscript. Gombrich’s willingness to update it showed his awareness of its renewed relevance. Significantly, he decided that the Popular Front-era manuscript needed very few changes to make it current for the new decade of dissent.

For one last time political events encouraged Gombrich to publish his and Kris’s experiment in scholarship. Before the war, the Popular Front had offered inspiration; after the war, the New Left’s challenge to the Cold War provided the stimulus. Again, what is significant is less the specific nature of the changes that went into the manuscript than the fact of revision itself. The changes did not produce a political book, nor did they incorporate new political insights. Mailer’s upside-down LBJ entered the manuscript as an example of revitalized image magic and not as a call for a new political language. But a new political movement helped to stir once more the thought of publishing his and Kris’s innovative work of scholarship. Just as in the world before 1939, so also in the world after 1945, the rise of a broadly based political culture of the Left proved vital to encouraging a critical, integrative experiment—or in this case, the revival of such an experiment. Gombrich’s return to the manuscript recalls that his pioneering insight into the role of conceptual schemas in visual art originally referred to political as well as mental constructs.

Carefully Gombrich incorporated the changes that seemed to him pertinent, even typing one of the revised pages in single rather than double space so as to preserve the prewar text’s original pagination. That small decision deserves emphasis: Gombrich remained intent on keeping the book nearly identical to the prewar version, down to the page numbers. Art and Illusion had put forward a new analysis of caricature art, but the book that he considered resurrecting in the 1960s revived his and Kris’s original argument from the antifascist era. Once more Gombrich saw the manuscript as belonging to the present. Yet, after having taken such pains, he returned the book to its place in his study. After 1966, he made no further effort to publish it. The manuscript remained in its binder, the outcome of a private experiment that now belonged to personal memory.

The motivating spirit of that memory did reappear in one of Gombrich’s finest essays: “The Photographer as Artist.” There he reflected on the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, the photojournalist who, like a Renaissance caricaturist, experimented with classical forms and who, like Kris, identified with the Popular Front. Gombrich—one of the first scholars to interpret the French photographer’s work as part of art history—emphasized that Cartier-Bresson had created, to use Kris’s phrase, a new twentieth-century realism.85 In that effort he was Daumier’s successor. But Daumier, according to Gombrich, “with his unfailing instinct for the ridiculous and pathetic, remained ultimately an inventor of types rather than an observer of life.”⁸⁶ More significant was the mediating influence of documentary film and especially of Jean Renoir. Kris’s description of Balzac and Daumier for the 1936 Vienna exhibition resonated again in Gombrich’s description of the great director who had hired Cartier-Bresson as an assistant on La Règle du jeu. Renoir, Gombrich wrote,

brought it home to us that we could be made to share the tragedies, comedies and tragicomedies of life around us in any setting, as the types and roles which people are made to play in society dissolved before our eyes to show the human being behind the mask.⁸⁷

Cartier-Bresson revived the great experiment that Kris and Gombrich had traced from Renaissance Bologna to contemporary Paris. Trained first as a painter, Cartier-Bresson—like the Carracci long before him—left the studio for the streets where he documented the world around him:

What he has said many times is that he waits for “the right moment” … What is the right moment? It is the moment, we must infer, when the language of reality becomes distinct and distinctive, not in the obvious cliché but through the mutual elucidation and articulation of all the sights within the frame. The capacity to integrate them Cartier-Bresson owes no doubt to the discipline of painting.88

The right moment—which Cartier-Bresson also described professionally and poignantly as the decisive moment—offered a model of integration. It combined classical, documentary, and critical visions:

Nearly all his pictures exhibit that visual balance, that secret geometry of a formal composition which counteracts the impression of the merely fortuitous and the contingent … He must have been lying in wait at such a spot with the camera ready for the moment when life entered the scene and completed the design at just the right point.⁸⁹

In a second essay on the photographer, Gombrich speculated that a direct link might exist between Cartier-Bresson’s photographic art and the experiment with caricature. Just as in effective caricature, so also in successful photographic portraits,

we are less aware of individual changes than of their resulting “global” impression. The most striking evidence of this global character of physiognomic likeness is offered by the successful caricature in which all the component features of the face are distorted, without affecting the resemblance of the whole. I do not know if Cartier-Bresson has ever indulged in this wicked game, but his drawings in pencil, crayon and pen prove him to be an eager explorer of the varied landscape of the face.90

Cartier-Bresson’s images overcame a caesura in time, not only in art history but also in Gombrich’s own life.

The idea of Cartier-Bresson as Daumier’s successor recalls that caricature evolved as an experiment not only with portraiture but also with light. Gombrich in fact included in Art and Illusion Daumier’s “Advice to a Young Artist” as a technical example of how color indicated degrees of illumination (Plate 16). A quiet masterpiece, the painting depicts an older artist examining the work of his younger colleague. With undisturbed concentration, the elder colleague analyzes the student’s experiment, while the novice tries to perceive his trial effort from a new angle of vision. At the same moment, from an unseen origin, shadows are dispelled and the space becomes partially lit. “The abrupt change of tone,” Gombrich explains, “brings the sunlight into the gloomy nineteenth-century interior.”⁹¹ The artist’s studio evokes the features of a dim, isolated reading room, a darkened world into which Daumier has conveyed a source of light.