James Elkins

Ten Reasons Why E. H. Gombrich is not Connected to Art History This is a speculative essay on the place of E. H. Gombrich in art history. Gombrich is universally known, and still often studied at the undergraduate and graduate levels. He is indispensable for the historiography of the discipline. But at the same time, he is not often cited, and his work is not usually part of the ongoing conversations of the current state of art history or visual studies. This brief essay questions that condition.

The theories I have outlined suggest that by displacing but not excluding theory, art historical practice at once grounds itself in empiricism and implies an acceptance of theory’s claim that it cannot be so grounded. But beyond descriptions like this, the theories are not a helpful way to understand practice because they cannot account for its persistence except by pointing to its transgressions and entanglements in self-contradiction. Nor does it help to say, pace Steven Knapp, Walter Benn Michaels, and Stanley Fish, that strong theory can have no consequences, because the reason theory has no consequences in this instance is not the impossibility of theory’s transcendence , but a combination of the conventions, desires, and beliefs of practicing historians.14 Theoretical approaches must bypass the concerns of practice because practice has no position which can be argued alongside theory’s positions. There are two reasons why a “Defense of Empiricism in Art History” has not been written. First, art historical practice does not incorporate even a local or heuristic theory to explain or discuss itself. Second, its “position” is not a latent theory, waiting to be eloquently stated, but something which is presupposed in a vague and variable manner by the art historical texts themselves. Art historical practice, for example, has an objectivist intention: it takes itself to be “a science, with definite principles and techniques,” which can exclude theory and generate texts by appealing only to previous nontheoretical texts and to the facts.15 This intention is rarely stated, exasperatingly slippery to formulate clearly, and even incoherent when it is applied to existing texts; but this is so precisely because it works by not being included in the texts. If some version of it were stated at the outset of a monograph, it would cast doubt on the entire enterprise and lead the reader to conclude incorrectly that practice is dependent on theory, and uncertain theory at that. In its unstated form, the objectivist intention allows narrative practice to continue unimpeded. James Elkins is a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago. This article is from a work in progress concerned with the influence of writing conventions on the history of art